I read the above as "avoid development that increases complexity needlessly" — and often, there is a desire to overcomplicate something that can be much simpler because the understanding is lacking.
"As much as they can" does not mean trying not to do any work, but trying to simplify the work where it achieves desired outcomes, and just about! This frequently means doing the improvement today.
This is what I was thinking - I'd say the biggest step up a developer can make is to recognize that sometimes you need a bit of one approach, sometimes a bit of another one.
Sometimes minimalism is the way, and you need to wonder if the pain, workload or lacking capabilities and features are problematic. Or, sometimes adding the smallest possible thing is a good way, as long as we don't paint ourself into a corner and enable learning and accumulating information of what we actually need.
Sometimes buying a thing is a good way, if you can find a good vendor and a tool fitting your use case and especially if the effort of doing it on your own is high. This commonly occurs in security, because keeping up to date with the ongoing vulnerability and threat landscape can be a full job on its own.
And sometimes adding something bigger is the way, if the effort of maintaining it are less than the effort and pain incurred by not having it. Or if we can ramp up the effort of the thing incrementally, while reaping benefits along the way. This can be validated often by doing a small thing.
What the AI will do in my opinion is to push the bar more in this direction. Cozily hacking CRUD-Code in a web server together most likely won't be enough in a year or two for the average development job.
Now combing through analytics to determine whether or not what we did was actually good? Less warm and cozy.
Is the improvement likely to reduce maintenance overhead (and thus cost)? Or improve performance allowing for fewer services running (and thus reducing cost)? Or reduce bugs that force people out of a workflow (eg in an online shop, thus fixing it increases sales)?
Or if it’s just tech debt then use Jira (etc) to your advantage and talk about the number of tickets you can close of this sprint due to this engineering initiative.
If the development team and product teams goals are largely aligned then the problem with engineering initiatives is just how you explain them to the product team.
preventing the unnecessary changes can help you get the political capital in your org to push through the changes that really need to happen.