IMO maintaining software will become easier, so much of what we do today with maintenance is really just tedious. It's tedious to keep packages updated, to write documentation every update, to keep the community informed on what's going to happen in the next. It's tedious to rewrite the exact same functionality but in a modern language. List goes on, so much tedious busywork. What if these things were handled for core maintainers, so they can allocate funds to more complex problems?
Maybe some.
But I resonate with the title because I noticed I started leaning on ChatGPT to avoid having to think through things. I found myself tweaking ChatGPT prompts and hoping for a better response when the previous one wasn’t good enough. Often a better response is not found, then I have to struggle to start thinking for myself.
Over time that leads to less repetition thinking through problems and more difficultly thinking through problems when you can’t use ChatGPT. Is that a good trade off?
Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing, we can focus our concerns elsewhere. Do you care exactly how your home is heated? Do you know how to maintain every part of your car? Do you spend every weekend keeping your skill on sewing up to date? Some of you might do all of these, but the point is we have let so many skills become things relegated to experts/tech that once used to be common.
It's this relegation that has allowed experts to become even deeper experts in their niche. So I don't worry about skills atrophying at all. There will always be a new crop of nerds (affectionately) to obsess over whatever niche can exist.