What exactly is the skill you acquire by using more AI? If the models get smarter, isnt it a waste of time to get good at the current gen?

I'm probably a worse programmer than I was before I started using frontier AI models, in the sense that I probably have a harder time reading, writing, and debugging code. And I doubt that my knowledge of the AI models themselves will have lasting practical value.

But, because of the explorations I've done with them, I know substantially more about input method APIs, UEFI, PCIDs, seL4, WebAssembly, GLSL, Service Workers, CORS, server-sent events, CSS, content-security policies, memory-hard PBKDFs, Android, numerical integration, Verilog, V8 security, Linux process namespaces, hypervisors with VT-x, multitouch user interface design, radio communications theory, power electronics, TypeScript, physical-layer communications protocols, NTSC video signals, TLA+, bounded model checking, Rust, generative testing, theorem provers, FPGAs, Linux system call overhead, Unix mailbox formats, physical modeling synthesis, damped resonance, KaTeX, geology, dishwashing detergent, microbiology, Cyclone, thermodynamics, X-Windows, localStorage, AVX, Excel, and IndexedDB, for example. Most of these are things I knew very little about before, so I may not know much about then now, but it's enormously more than I did.

Aside from being very pleasurable, I have the impression that this knowledge is valuable in designing systems whose implementation I can then elicit from an AI model.

I don't know how long the knowledge will remain instrumentally valuable. Possibly a year from now, we'll all be dead, or slaves to Sam Altman. Or the AIs will be so much better at designing the systems we would have wanted to design, if we were smarter and knew more, that there's no instrumental value in humans doing it. Or, less drastically, maybe a new AI-written software platform will have so completely displaced Android and the browser platform that there's no value in knowing what they do and don't permit. Like knowing the ins and outs of PHIGS, INFORMIX-ONLINE, or CORBA. (Thermodynamics is probably safe, though.)

But it seems like, in the less insane possible futures, a lot of this knowledge will remain empowering for some time.

The skill of getting familiar with AI use, how to use it, when to use, learning when NOT to use it, is the skill that will land you your next job. Or would you in 2030 expect to hire software devs that never touched AI?

You get better at building things - asking the right questions at the right time, knowing what to trust and what to look into.

Not very different from managing a team, just without the human problems.