[karmasimida]

AI boom and austerity on hiring can be happen at the same time.

AI boom is interesting in the sense, if the AI successfully increases programmer productivity, then it also would drive down the demands, unless AI can increase the pie by eating away other industries. So far I haven't seen this, AI seems to have a bigger impact on software industry itself than any other industry out there.

Not very optimistic that AI alone can change the tide, but considering how fast things can change (GPT-5 might be the AGI, or GPT-4 level model gets open sourced and runs much cheaper everywhere), 6 months in the future the outlook might change drastically.