I made a bet in 2019 to _not_ learn any more on how to fiddle with NN architectures. It paid off. Now I just send data to a huggingface API and it figures out the rest.

What will change? What are my thoughts?

All well identified problems become rat races. If there's a metric you can put on it, engineers will optimize it away. The comfort of knowing what you're doing has a well-defined metric is paid for in the anxiety of the rat race of everyone optimizing the same metric.

What do we do with this?

Work on problems that don't have a well defined metric. Work with people. Work with the real world. Work with things that defies quantification, that are difficult to reduce to a mere number that everyone agrees on. That way you have some longevity in the field.