Spot on, the size of backend teams reduced drastically as we made the progression through cloud, serverless, SaaS, iPaaS, and now agent orchestration tooling.
What would be a team of about 20 devs a decade ago, are usually about 5 persons across all project roles.
Hence when someone says their job is AI safe, I can only understand they weren't affected by such "progress".
I'd argue it's different because ephemeral, vps, baremetal, self-hosted, the skillset is still "managing a linux server" and the most radical shift is to an expectation that a server is a thing that is created and destroyed on demand (so now you need to script deployment), which isn't really a radical shift away from the skillset.
The goal of AI seems to pretty explicitly be "stop coding; from now on the mechanic fixes your car", which I would argue is a very different shift.
Also if you host a criminal content on AWS they probably close your account and ban you instead of silently rerouting all traffic away from your server (which may just be hosting a game where you kill goblins or steal cars or something) and refusing to acknowledge that that's what's happening.
Ya if you just run VMs but now a lot of cloud vendors have you build stuff using their proprietary features so decoupling becomes harder and can be risky.
What would be a team of about 20 devs a decade ago, are usually about 5 persons across all project roles.
Hence when someone says their job is AI safe, I can only understand they weren't affected by such "progress".