Sure about Dario (and all billionaire) weirdness, but no gains if you are a skilled senior is well, very far out in our experience (our company is 30 years old with mostly the original employees and founders): what we deliver now at the speed and quality we deliver it would have been impossible 10 years ago with our team size of skilled seniors. We replaced all the commercial products our clients and ourselves used with our own, giving us millions more revenue and profit with the upselling and efficiency benefits. We work for regulated clients: our code is reviewed, pentested and audited regularly by us and 3rd parties so its not slop either. You are definitely leaving money on the table. We do mostly use chinese models on our own hardware (we colocate cages of racks) so this is not about Anthropic but about AI in general.

Skill athrophy is a real thing though; we try to prevent this by have hackethons (for lack of a better word) without AI where I pick something extremely non trivial and we implement it for fun and profit without AI (with would not matter much as they are currently bad at these things); last one was flex paxos for our in house db with obvious metrics for the endresult: data integrity (duh) under failure and performance better or at least the same as our raft production version.