Predisposition first: I am a cynic about AI (and concerned about skill atrophy) but I am teaching myself how it all works from the open source harness/open weights local model side of things. I'm also recovering from burnout that left me unable to work.

What I see in the real world that is speeding up:

- slop clones of major apps for which I have zero professional respect and with which I just won't ever engage

- quite rapidly improving open source developer tooling. More sandbox and container management stuff here, a new cross-platform non-electron database app there

- obviously, AI tooling apps are maturing much more quickly than apps did before

- iOS/iPadOS: a few improvements and new native, non-web-shelled apps — suddenly Amazon Prime's video app is better than ever before, apps that were clearly HTML wrappers have native apps

- there is a downturn in the quality of other things (macOS and iPadOS themselves are both janky in ways that feel like they should have gone away)

- rapidly worsening web experience — small fonts, low contrast, too much furniture, worsening copy.

What I see in my world:

- fewer blank page problems

- more pathways to do things — a CMS-backed, closing-on-two-decade-old website I thought would need scrapping and rewriting has a pathway to framework modernisation/standardising and then automatic rewriting

- I feel as a freelancer more able to take on jobs my own way, knowing I am less lumbered with any choices I make and should find it easier to hand over anything an LLM can help maintain

- no real improvement in how easy it is to build good content or good designs

- clients who often won't do the thinking/decisions you ask them to do anymore. They are no longer slow to answer, but the answer will be slop.