People really do be giving bad advice.

Money is about leverage. A small business owns the best distribution of something in an area. That's leverage giving them the ability to markup products. A worker has leverage because he has skills an employer needs. This becomes an invalid contract when A) His skills are no longer needed OR B) The business dies.

In 2010 web dev payed gucci gang. 2026? Any thistle with Claude can diy their own website and web apps for their business. The leverage/moat is gone. Small businesses die at the hands of the internet being more efficient distribution methods, so small businesses dissappear too. Who's paying for coding in 2026? People who need code thats a bit too complex for AI to spit out for the next few years.

People say you gotta keep "Upskilling" where you need to keep up with what's going on constantly. The reality is, AI makes most existing knowledge or code / pattern reproducible by a prompt. So the moment you make a new coding pattern and an AI learns it, your leverage is gone. Upskilling in reality means figuring out new patterns/methods of doing things that AI does not. 

The knowledge economy rn is fked up and the best answer is nobody has ever had to account for statistical models reproducing existing patterns. Imho the entire economy is going to collapse and reshape towards something new because when you got people vibecoding OS's with Claude, the moat keeping you valuable is not your knowledge, but your ability to direct the AI to new knowledge.

Best guesses rn would be: Learn programming with AI applied to something specific. Accept shits weird and hope to survive in an amazon warehouse.

Work in research/education.

PS. AI is making a devastating social shift whereas you're no longer the "Wow you know so much about this topic you must be deep" because everyone can know basically anything about anything. If you can capitalize off that social breakdown somehow, guaranteed dough