It's a nice article. In a way though it kind of bypasses what I see as the main takeaways. It's not about AI development, it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". The problems that we see with AI have little to do with AI "development", they have to do with AI marketing and promulgation. If the author had gone ahead and dammed the creek with a shovel, or blown off his hand…
I think it's a little deeper than that. It's the democratization of capability.
If few people have the tools, the craftsman is extremely valuable. He can make a lot of money without a glut of knowledge or real skill. In general the people don't have the tools and skills to catch up to where he is. He is wealthy with only frontloaded effort.
If everyone has the same tools, the craftsman still has value, because of the knowledge and skillset developed over time. He makes more money because his skills are valuable and remain scarce; he's incentivized to further this skillset to stay above the pack, continue to be in demand, and make more money.
If the tools do the job for you, the craftsman has limited value. He's an artifact. No matter how much he furthers his expertise, most people will just turn the tool on and get good enough product.
We're in between phase 2 and 3 at the moment. We still test for things like algorithm design and ask questions in interviews about the complexity of approaches. A lot of us still haven't moved on to the "ok but now what?" part of the transition.
The value now is less knowing how the automation works and improving our knowledge of the underlying design, but how to use the tools in ways that produce more value than the average Joe. It's a hard transition for people who grew up thinking this was all you needed to get a comfortable or even lucrative life.
I'm past my SDE interview phase of life now and in seeking engineers I'm looking less for people who know how to build a version of the tool and more people who operate in the present, have accepted the change, and want to use what they have access to and add human utility to make the sum of the whole greater than the parts.
To me the best part of building software was the creativity. That part hasn't changed. If anything it's more important than ever.
Ultimately we're building things to be consumed by consumers. That hasn't changed. The creek started flowing in a different direction and your job in this space is not to keep putting rocks where the water used to go, and more accepting that things are different and you have to adapt.