Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.

I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.

I attribute 3 reasons to this change:

- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)

- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.

- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)

AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.

I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).

-- a 28 year old