Ultimately it's up to the user to decide what to do with his time ; it's still a good bargain that leaves a lot of sovereignty to the user. I like to code a little too much ; got into deep tech to capacities I couldn't imagine before - but at some point you hit rock bottom and you gotta ship something that makes sense. I'm like a really technical "predator" - in a sense where to be honest with myself - it has almost become some way of consumption rather than pure problem solving. For very passionate people it can be difficult to be draw the line between pleasure and work - especially given that we just do what we like in the first place - so all that time feel robbed from us - and from the standpoint of "shipper" who didn't care about it in the first place it feels like freedom.

But I'd argue that if anyone wants to jump into technical stuff ; it has never been so openly accessible - you could join some niche slack where some competent programmers were doing great stuff. Today a solo junior can ship you a key-val that is going to be fighting redis in benchmarks.

It really is not a time to slack down in my opinion - everything feels already existing and mostly already dealt with. But again - for those who are frustrated with the status-quo ; they will always find something to do.

I get you however that this has created a very different space where past acquired skill-sets don't necessarily translate as well today - maybe it's just going to be different to find it's space than it was 10 years ago.

I like that the cards have be re-dealt though - it's arguably way more open than the stack-overflow era and pre-ai where knowledge was much more difficult to create.