AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much.

Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable.

The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done.

Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with.

As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority!

However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely?

These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.