I think ICs are threatened because they're told from day one how they are at will employees that can be terminated at any time with or without cause.

On top of that, places like Amazon extol the virtues of only working on projects that can be completed with entirely fungible staffing and Google tries ever so hard to electroplate this steaming turd of an ideology with iron pyrite calling fungibles "generalists."

So along comes AI coding agents, which I love as an IC because it excels at tedious work I'd rather not have to do in the first place, yet I get why others see it as a threat. But I really think it's no more of a threat than any other empty promise to cut costs with the silver bullet of the month and we just have to let the loudmouths insist otherwise until the industry figures out this isn't a magic black box. They never learn, do they? Maybe their jobs depend on never learning.