>but the shift has never been as fundamental as it is today with AI.

How are we so sure? I'm not old enough to have lived through every/many big shifts in our industry but how do we know this is not what people who lived through the compiler-shift era felt? Or people who saw higher level languages like C or C++ be created, or the punch cards getting replaced with a digital display?

This AI stuff feels magical and so much bigger than other shifts, but maybe only in retrospect.