What is going on right now?

This ends in Idiocracy. The graybeards will phase out, the juniors will become staff level, except.. software will just be "more difficult". No-one really understands how it works, how could they? More importantly WHY should they? The Machine does the code. If The Machine gets it wrong it's not my fault.

The TRUE takeaway here is that as of about 12 months ago, spending time investing in becoming a god-mode dev is not the optimal path for the next phase of whatever we're moving into.

I'm afraid we already in the phase where regular devs have no idea how things work under the hood. So many web devs fail on the simple interview question "what happens when user enters a url and presses enter?" I would understand not knowing the details of DNS protocol, but not understanding the basics of what browser/OS/CPU is doing is just unprofessional.

And LLM assisted coding apparently makes this knowledge even less useful.

> So many web devs fail on the simple interview question "what happens when user enters a url and presses enter?"

Is the answer you're looking for along the lines of "the browser makes a GET request to the specified URL," or something lower-level than that?

I think it's one of those intentionally vague questions that helps in probing the knowledge depth. Interviewees are typically free to describe the process with as much detail as they can.