Since the beginning of the AI hype, I’ve felt that the real winners would still be real engineers.

The pattern I've seen isn't that AI can't do the work. Challenge is if an org cuts the people who held the context, not just the people who did the tasks. The tasks came back looking fine. The decisions downstream of those tasks didn't. You can automate execution. You can't automate the judgment that came from five years of seeing what broke last time.

Layoffs happened because companies realised they overhired during pandemic and needed a ramp-off to fire people without having their stocks tanks as they always did during mass layoffs, and AI narrative came handy.

People got bored with crypto and NFT and NVIDIA suddenly had a nard time selling GPUS, and AI narrative came handy.