I am seeing the same. The skillsets degrading rather rapidly, people not able to maintain focus and becoming less sharp in general. The brain rot associated with short form videos is affecting our industry via LLMs. It doesn't give me any joy to see it happening, especially to people I care about.
I don't know why I haven't been able to see the similarity between short form content and LLMs in our industry until reading your comment, but that is apt. That's the impression I'm getting. I stay away from "agentic code generation" as much as possible, just like I avoid short form content mills like the plague. That said, LLMs have been a huge boon for me as a research assistant. Being able to look up very niche problems, and have responses be tailored to me, is awesome. My brain stays sharp and I still enjoy the fun of putting the pieces together myself much faster than before.
I don't personally like LLMs for research assistance (yet?) because i can't get over the hallucinating or rather, waste too much time validating that it's not currently overcast when they tell me the sky is in fact blue.
But, especially as code gets flung over the wall faster and with less care, I do think they are getting to be pretty great at reviewing code for specific things that a linter can't easily catch and for looking for security, implementation, and architectural flaws before I have to look for them. A couple examples of what i mean: 'does the code use knex.raw with a template literal?', 'does the code do n+1 db lookups instead of something better?' 'do all the added/modified tests follow the test case template defined here?'
Agreed. I trust it more as a codebase query system rather than a codebase writer.