it's not really comparable IMO

Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system

I think the environment and landscape will change and different skills will be more valuable for developers

But I think the existing skill-sets developers use can mostly be automated away

If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.

> Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system

You are describing a templating system. It's useful to create projects from scratch, but that's not what software engineers do 99% of the time.

What software engineers do 99% of the time is modifying existing services to adapt to changing requirements that more often than not are grossly unspecified.

Also, a key part of a software engineer's work is serve as a point of contact with non software engineers to discuss what services do and plan work.

> If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.

I don't think this assumption holds water. At most your efficiency improved as short contracts to patch random customer projects now can meet the definition of done (maintenance be damned) in shorter iterations.

However, ironically we are also seeing the occurrence of consultancy firms specialized in providing software engineering services as contract engineers that are explicitly marketed as solutions to problems introduced by vibe-coding.