I’m rapidly feeling like it’s pointless to bother learning when you can badly cobble something together with a chatbot and the managers of the world will ejaculate themselves dry about how good robots are, even when the bloody thing barely functions.

Rhetorical question: How much of your decade of development has been in a professional capacity

That has ALWAYS been true. A barely functioning Proof Of Concept has always been sexy. Someone has an idea, they make a barely functioning example of it working (often depending on stack overflow and asking others for help), show it to Management, and get money. With Management often thinking how they can either rapidly patent something in there or sell it off to a larger company.

Nothing there is new aside from "AI" replacing "ask Stack Overflow".

And, just to be clear, that was also true in the hobbyist space. Think about how often you saw an article like "someone recreated PT in Unreal Engine?!?!?!!?!" (not to mention PT itself being the kind of project you give a new hire to learn the toolchain but...). Same with all those emulators that "added VR" and so forth. They are cool concepts that tend to not go anywhere or...

Once a POC becomes a Product? That is where knowledge matters. You no longer want the answer someone shat out while waiting for a belle claire video to download. You need to actually define your corner cases, improve performance, and build out a roadmap.

And... that ALSO isn't about learning new tools and tech. A lot of that comes out of it, but that is where the difference between "computer programmer" and "software engineer' comes into play. Because it becomes an engineering problem where you define and implement testing frameworks and build out the gitlab issues and so forth.

Like, a LOT of dumbfucks try to speedrun their way to management because it is more money. But the reality is that a good Engineer SHOULD become a manager as they "grow up". Because you need people with technical ability to have a say in building out that roadmap and in allocating resources to different issues. Optimally you still get to code a lot (I am a huge fan of middle management in that regard) but... yeah.