It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.