increasingly small is right. i'm definitely part of that former group but sadly more and more these days i just feel dumb for being this way. it usually just means that i'm less productive than my colleagues in practice as i'm spending time figuring out how things work while everybody else is pushing commits. maybe if we were put in a hypothetical locked room with no internet access i'd have a slightly easier time than them but that's not helpful to anybody.

once upon a time i could have said that it's better this way and that everybody will be thankful when i'm the only person who can fix something, but at this point that isn't really true when anybody can just get an LLM to walk them through it if they need to understand what's going on under the hood. really i'm just a nerd and i need to understand if i want to sleep at night lol.