Comment by layer8
2 hours ago
But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.
Ok but I think this is just a kind of myopic view that is specifically focused on the things you were / are interested in. AI is a different paradigm that is changing things for a different contingent of people.
To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.
I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.