Only now have I understood the radical change of the IT market.

The majority of companies are not different from average entrepreneurs/resellers. All they've been doing all this time was repackaging something already existing into something else. Shopify + SMS API + machine learning = you can order stuff by messaging that service. OCR + machine learning = you can have bookkeeping done by that service. Etc, etc. The byproduct of this has been that people who worked on all this stuff could devote their time to their side-projects or some open-source tools. So, being financially safe, people felt fine doing something more. They maybe even were encouraged by the company they worked for to do this side stuff, so they don't lose the enthusiasm to push forward during the working hours.

Now these companies have AI tools. So they only need so many people who could manage these tools to provide them with the relatively similar output. So the main goal is to keep the revenue coming in. And this doesn't mean that the product has to be reliable, stable, of good quality. It just has to be good enough to satisfy the customer. And people are not critical-thinking creatures in their majority. So the so-called AI-slop can actually provide these companies with the same amount of sales.

The era of creative, enthusiastic approach is over. If you want to experiment, you either need to be a genius, to be in demand. Or to end up in a place that allows these experiments, for example, some scientific place. Or just to have enough money to keep going. Otherwise, your work in the IT sector is going to be an AI operator. No way around it.

Wow. It took me some time.