Cynically they may be banking (however misguided it turns out to be) on model skill in aggregate growing faster than the skills of their staff decline at which point, bin the staff, use the model.

The hype from non-technical people about AI would make you think they already discovered AGI.

It doesn't seem clear to me at all. e.g. I've been having a fun time learning Godot this last week with codex laying down groundwork for logic, generating assets, etc. This gives me something concrete that I can work with and ground myself within instead of starting from a blank canvas. I don't much care for the actual scripting logic because it's all basically trivial to me with a few decades of programming experience, and I'm not going to be able to develop my artistic abilities to a useful capacity anytime within the next few years, so I can instead focus on learning architecture/organization patterns and game systems that I'm interested in while I read through docs.

So basically, if you use it to wave away things you've mastered or explicitly don't want to learn at the moment, you can stay focused on things you are figuring out. I don't see it as any different from writing "by induction" in a math proof without writing all the details because you and the reader know you could easily work them out. In this way I can learn things that I simply would not have the time to dig into before, increasing my skillset. As is was before AI, metacognition is the most widely useful skill to have.

I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you make it out to be.

Maintenance <> growth

Once you got a skill it’s quite hard to actually lose it. It’s like riding a bike as they say.

I find all the reading of those walls of code exercises my mind better than the writing did. I’m sure I lost memories of how to read a file by hand or balance a tree but who cares?

I am thinking about architecture and design a lot more these days and every decision I make has to be actually argued for even to myself. I can no longer lean back and say “that’s how we always do it” or “too expensive to change now” as I find many people in practice actually do. They were just coasting on premade architectural choices and their “skills” consisted of knowing arcane incantations and syntactic details completely unrelated to the (business) problem at hand.

I am not convinced many developers actually have the skills they think they have. They could wrestle syntax and mess around with tooling, but could they abstract properly? Define clear semantic boundaries? Have proper civil discussions about responsibilities and where they should lie on the right level of abstraction? Nothing has changed in that regard. If anything that part has been amplified. (“taste”)

" skill decline is real"

Is this -> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level?

or

Is this -> Existing experts, are actually loosing there skills? Using AI is reducing someone already known skills.

Why surprised? The elephant is in someone else's room.