San Francisco has seen its share of tech gold rushes — the dot-com frenzy, the social media era, the crypto fever dream — but according to the city's own chief economist, the current AI boom is the strangest one yet. And honestly? Walk around SoMa on any given Tuesday and you'll feel it in your bones.

Here's what makes this cycle genuinely odd: the money is pouring in, but the jobs aren't following at the same rate. Previous booms flooded the city with young workers who needed apartments, bought $7 lattes, and packed the bars on weekends. The AI boom is generating enormous valuations and breathtaking amounts of venture capital — but the companies leading the charge are running remarkably lean. Turns out, when your product is literally designed to automate work, you don't need to hire 3,000 people to get it off the ground.

The result is a boom that looks great on paper — commercial real estate in certain corridors is tightening up, investor money is sloshing around, and every third storefront on Market Street seems to have an "AI" somewhere in its name — but the downstream economic effects that usually come with a tech surge are muted. Restaurants aren't as packed. The housing crunch isn't re-intensifying the way you'd expect. Tax revenue isn't surging proportionally.

As one SF resident put it, "It's a boom where the robots got the jobs instead of the transplants from Ohio."

For a city that has spent the last three years desperately trying to recover from the pandemic-era exodus, this is a genuinely tricky position. City Hall has been banking on tech's return to refill coffers and revitalize downtown. But if this boom generates billions in wealth while employing a fraction of the workforce previous cycles did, San Francisco needs to stop planning for the boom it wants and start planning for the boom it actually has.

That means rethinking tax strategies, getting realistic about commercial vacancy, and — here's a novel idea — maybe not spending like the good old days are back when they clearly aren't. The AI boom is real. The question is whether City Hall is smart enough to recognize that this one plays by different rules.