We are seeing the same patterns: move to advertisement, anti-open source strategies, aggressive acquihires.
Companies driving AI are dinosaurs, funded by dinosaurs or aiming to become like them.
It literally feels like nothing has changed in 30 years.
There is absolutely no knowledge gap in learning to use AI tools. Only non-developers have issues, and they dominated the discourse with make-believe fantasy problems. Writing text, organizing markdown documents, writing good specifications... this is just not hard at all. Any developer can pick it up in a week, it's not a matter of adaptation, it's a matter of choice.
Anecdotally, the common theme I'm starting to hear more often now is that people who use “AI” at work despise it when it replaces humans outright, but love it when it saves them from mundane, repetitive crap that they have to do.
These companies are not selling the world on a vision where LLMs are a companion tool, instead, they are selling the world on some idea that this is the new AI coworker. That 80/20 rule you're calling out is explained away with words like “junior employee.”
I think it's also important to see that even IF there are those selling it as a companion tool, it's only in the meantime. That is, it's your companion now, but because we need you next to it to make it better so it can be an "AI employee" once it's trained from your companionship.
There's currently a bit of an 80/20 rule with AI where it does great automating 80% of an overlapping problem domain and chokes on it 20% of the time.
The idea of someone giving 100% of their work to Claude as in the examples is dumb. But so is someone doing 100% of the busywork themselves.
Don't waste your own time and your client's money for the sake of some nonsense purity ideal. Learn to thread the needle of changing times.
Cause they are gonna keep changing.