Even if AI is an absolutely bubble, and SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all cease to exist in a year... there's simply no way that AI has not fundamentally changed work. Even if I was forever pinned to the local models I'm running and the agent harnesses they use, I would never write code for work the same way.
But I lived through the rise of the web. I remember serving dynamic websites through cgi (which meant a new instance of an interpreter was spawned per user session). I vividly remember great JavaScript books saying things like "never use JavaScript for core functionality". I recall Java engineers saying Ruby on Rails was a toy and would never take off, that Python offered nothing over Perl and that "rich web applications" where never going to replace app native interfaces. I remember when the MVC pattern from the early Smalltalk days being dusted off and repurposed for web applications, completely changing how we designed software for the web.
And all of that is just software. It wasn't until the pandemic that ebooks replaced print books in share of academic library circulation (reversing a decades long trend of reduced circulation).
In my daily use of agents for coding and other forms of problem solving, while it is a wild accelerant, it's also clear we have not even started scratching the surface of how to think about building things with these tools.
I suspect we'll adapt to AI faster, but having lived through one major tech revolution, transforming work still takes some time. I'm not surprised we don't see an immediate jobs crisis.
Not to mention the completely separate topic that huge classes of employees were not and are not all that productive, so boosts in productivity don't imply lost jobs. That would require a boost in productivity combined with pressure to create concrete value with less, looking at the SpaceX IPO we're still a ways away from working about how efficiently we create concrete value.