In my view the naysayers always simply been moving the goalposts, and never admit when they were wrong. "AI just produces slop" -> "AI can't write useful code" -> "AI can't take SWE jobs" -> [we are here]
You, just like 'them' are no better. It would be better if all those on the extreme ends could be muted - the truth is closer to the middle.
Didn't Oracle just lay off 30k people, Meta plans on laying off thousands more this year, Microsoft and Amazon have already done layoffs in the name of AI?
So at what point should naysayers update their priors? How many times must people be proven wrong to think "maybe I have the wrong perspective here after all?"
Full disclosure, I used to be a skeptic myself in the early days, but I think being a skeptic today is pure stubbornness, not rational.
I do not think the recent reliability and quality of major services would be considered acceptable if it weren't for a domestic tech oligopoly systematically lowering standards.
The U.S. auto industry also shows that oligopolies can shut out competition for quite some time and steer their captive market into accepting mediocrity, but innovation continues anyway. It's quite the contrast seeing domestic automakers turn their backs on EVs at the same time the Chinese are advertising 10 minute flash charging.
What matters is the aggregate activity in the labour market - for which - the activity associated with demand for software engineers is healthy.