> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people.

This is definitely the case for me. Before AI tools became mainstream, it was already a difficult proposition to find other smart people who you could get along with and talk to, do something interesting together. The Internet made all the difference in my life because I was able to get outside my geographic region to do big things through open source and hacker communities. Now, that very important filter mechanism no longer works. It's Eternal September all over again. In a way, it's very much a domination of "ends" over "means" in the wider community that is being forced upon those who long focused on "means". For a lot of intelligent people, understanding something is /valuable on its own/, but for the wider world there is no value in simply knowing things, but what you do with that knowledge (or now that lack of knowledge). I even experienced this recently at DEFCON 34 where I saw other participants in some of the CTFs with me using AI tools and not really understanding what the tools were doing or what was happening, but just kind of bruteforcing/tokenmaxxing their way through. This isn't to say that those AI tools are fundamentally a bad thing to use in building open source software, security research, or even as a tool in a CTF, but that the "understanding" step needs to still be present or it destroys the fun in everything.

I'm certainly not having as much fun with computers these days, even as I've invested a lot of effort myself in local LLMs and trying to understand the tools and understand how to apply them reasonably, I've found I prefer much more analog entertainments. Thankfully there's always photography and lockpicking to entertain me at the moment and provide a pathway to meet other interesting fellows.