If there is so much extra code, where is it going? Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?
yes, like the crypto or productivity 'industry', where every project exists to manage your other crypto and productivity projects, the dynamic of 'AI programming' seems to be to make software to manage your other two dozen AI things
mysteriously enough, big open source projects that people actually use in the real world aren't seeing their issues closed at any higher rates, almost as if that requires actual maintenance and programming (which Fred Brooks told us this half a century ago)
I've done a lot of "plain compute" work [0] with the Big Three Cloud Compute vendors. Azure is by far the worst. Mysterious resource creation failures, mysterious resource deletion failures, mysterious "incompatible schema" failures when talking to Azure provisioning and status infrastructure, mysterious and inexplicable performance problems, etc, etc, etc. Unless I was being paid a lot of money to use Azure, I'd take Google's legendarily nonexistent support over Azure's unreliability any day.
[0] That is, "create a VM with persistent disks, Internet access, and maybe a load balancer in front and ignore all of the other features provided by the vendor"