Skills that you need come and go. I owned a commodore 64 once and knew how to use it. All gone. I fired up an emulator a few years ago and then had a big "now what moment" where I realized I had no clue what to do with it. I had a vague memory of inserting tapes and issuing commands to load stuff from it. Function keys were important. And there was a manual I once had that explained it all. But no muscle memory. Nothing. I'm sure I could have figured it out eventually. Same with DOS. It's decades ago since I did anything on a DOS command line. All gone.

This doesn't matter. That stuff belongs in a museum. I've used AWS pretty extensively a few years ago. I switched to gcloud and other providers later. At some point in the last year, I started delegating all of the pesky work of interfacing with that stuff to AI. It's amazing. I've always referred to AWS documentation as a maze of misdirection. Just endless amounts of documentation mixed with marketing pages that are completely useless. All links lead back to those. So you are constantly fighting their marketing people to get at the bit you actually want which is a mess of fragmented reference documentation with parameters, endpoints, etc. Staying on top of that and keeping it in your head is a skill that will atrophy that I never cared about.

AI is great for figuring out micro detail like that. It's also great for coming up with a bigger plan that involves stringing together lots of tools, commands, scripts, and what not to execute a high level goal of "I want to run this thing over there". And with a bit of work you can actually do this the right way as well. It's fine. I never really liked devops to begin with. I can do it and I appreciate it done properly and can tell the difference. But I've always hated how it sucked up my time when what I really wanted to do was move our product forward. Instead of which I ended up dealing with a lot of arcane AWS or whatever crap that just needed dealing with. And there's always more of it. Just endless amount of micro detail. AI is great for getting on top of that.