> My hope is that there is a sort of Cambrian explosion of small software projects built by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing

It doesn’t even have to be people with no idea what they’re doing. If you lay off enough smart people from big tech companies, those people might put together small companies that directly compete with larger ones at a fraction of the cost.

Lots of small companies pumping out software to solve problems. What will happen is companies will switch to their software, get burnt and then never move off established large core tech similar to what we see today but far worse.

These small companies will only be able to sell through basically scam marketing.

That all implies that AI won't get ( much) better anymore.

I doubt that