Not everyone wants to be a "prompt engineer", or let their skills rust and be replaced with a dependency on a proprietary service. Not to mention the potentially detrimental cognitive effects of relegating all your thinking to LLMs in the long term.
Same with folks who were used to ftp directly into prod and used folders instead of source control.
Look, I get it, it's frustrating to be really good at current tech and feel like the rug is getting pulled. I've been through a few cycles of all new shiny tools. It's always been better for me to embrace the new with a cheerful attitude. Being grumpy just makes people sour and leave the industry in a few years.
The former puts you in command of more machinery, but the tools are dependable. The latter requires you to stay sharp at your current level, else you won’t be able to spot the problems.
Although… I would argue that in the former case you should learn assembly at least once, so that your computer doesn’t seem like a magic box.
Isnt this what a compiler is really doing? JIT optimizes code based on heuristics, it a code path is considered hot. Sure, we might be able to annotate it, but by and large you let the tools figure it out so that we can focus on other things.
I’m not sure I entirely agree but I do think the paradigm is shifting enough that I feel bad for my coworkers who intentionally don’t use AI. I can see a new skill developing in myself that augments my ability to perform and they are still taking ages doing the same old thing. Frankly, now is the sweet spot because the expectation hasn’t raised enough to meet the output so you can either squeeze time to tackle that tech debt or find time to kick up your feet until the industry catches up.