I'm not sure I buy that argument about dynamic languages. You are probably right in that auto complete played a role, but for me working on a pure node js app back in 2014ish, it was a nightmare of runtime issues that type checking would have eliminated. The productivity gain in a typed language was not having to write unit tests for things that static typing does for free.

I agree with you, autocomplete definitely isn't the only reason for static typing making a comeback and dynamic language popularity dying off (and the big legacy names like Javascript and Python have Typescript and mypy/pyright to transform them into a facsimile of one). I think a lot of it has to do with maturity, where a lot of "move fast and break things" devs who loved untyped Node/PHP/Python got burned by bugs and impossible to comprehend legacy codebases and slowly realized the value of static typing. But that type of understanding takes years. A novice programmer can see the value of autocomplete and not having to check the docs or stackoverflow for the name of a method pretty much instantly.

autocomplete accurately took care of a lot of the boilerplate; that low-hanging fruit has been picked. AI is not doing the same IME, the pay-off has been a lot slower coming, and sometimes it's making the work more painful.

I do agree. It's hard to get an unbiased assessment of how many developers are actually using generative AI (copilot/chatgpt) for work, and in what capacity they do use them. Anecdotally, at my org of ~40 devs, we encouraged everyone to try out Copilot and let us know if they wanted a full license; only 2 people took up the offer, and they use it either for generating unit tests or translating English data logic to pandas syntax (which it does seem quite good at!)