> I hear most loudly from software engineers far removed from ordinary non-technical end users

I am absolutely not far removed from non-technical end users. They are my client base, ultimately. As a freelancer I focus on building real things that make things better for people whose faces and voices I get to know. GenAI will be useless to them, because it is antithetical to what they do.

And that focus is only getting keener; I want nothing to do with the AI-generated web.

> They are my client base, ultimately... I focus on building real things that make things better for people... faces and voices I get to know.

So what I'm hearing is, "I agree very strongly with the people who pay me." Or to put it in your words:

"MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save time."

"THEIR product is just a poorly-thought-out slop generator"

The problem with this line of reasoning is that things can get steadily worse and you'll never be allowed to say or do anything about it.

No, everything is not the same as everything else.

Every technical advancement has tradeoffs. Not every technical advancement has billions of dollars sloshing around doing absolutely nothing except making the web worse and further ruining the environment. What a shockingly bad-faith way to interpret GP's argument, wow.

The comment is an interesting but very cookie cutter sort of vamp and drama. The comment trades in a bunch of generalization, much like yours, and you know, generalization doesn't feel good when it directly attacks you.

I don't sincerely believe that people who are working on Kubernetes features or observability tools are bad people. Do high drama personalities who engage in a mode of discourse of "wow" and "shockingly" say valid things too? Yeah. But it's as simple as, log in your own eye before you worry about the thorns in others. Exceptionally ironic because the poster is vamping about "Attribution errors." Another POV is, shysters project.