1-2 years ago we were told even by people like simonw that if we do not get on the AI train ahead of time we will never be able to catch up with the AI experts who had years of experience with AI.
Meanwhile in practice the opposite happened. You just need bog standard software development experience with an agent focus. You need to know how to set up an agentic CI pipeline, how to set up on demand sandboxes, basically a lot of devops and software development life cycle knowledge and less AI specific knowledge. It's just that AI caused those old things to become ever more important and urgent.
So what the author means by "AI Skills" are skills that relate exclusively to AI and no other domain.
Wow, this is a great point. I guess there's two parts to this in my mind: the media part and the actual impact on the developer population. The media/tech influencer part is unsurprising, anyone publishing media in the AI space has to constantly push hot and FOMO inducing takes in order to stay relevant. The impact on devs is more interesting; the AI has become so accessibly good by default that everyone is expected to be able to speed run every part of the stack and infrastructure.