Seems clear that the age of everyone and their dog getting a programming gig for easy money is coming to a close. What will be left (for the foreseeable future) is positions for very highly skilled software engineers who actually know the craft well enough to make good use of AI.

The industry is going to shift from hiring as many programmers as you can afford to hiring a small number of the best engineers you can find. AI can't replace an engineer's skill and insight, and I have yet to see signs that LLMs are fundamentally capable of such a thing. What is screamingly obvious however is that when a highly skilled engineer learns how to drive AI agents, that's when you get true effort multiplication. A real engineer can leverage AI in ways that an unskilled vibe coder simply cannot, because it turns out that building a house still requires engineering even when you have a nail gun. LLMs can write code all day but if you don't understand programming and engineering on your own, you lack fundamental tools to build software.

Sorry kids, buffet is closed. No more FAANG salaries for anyone with a pulse and a copy of VSCode. The future of the industry looks to lie with a vastly smaller number of much more highly skilled engineers.

What happens when those engineers age out and we realize we stopped training new ones? I genuinely fear for the coming generations of engineers. It's not going to be good.

I recommend you learn to weld instead.