Why not?

It's a highly paid, in demand career path where formal education is optional.

They came for the sysadmins first because they had more power, but they were always coming for you.

Even if "Agentic Coding" doesn't solve programming, there is an aligned incentive not to care, I've heard directly from the executives at large companies that they despise the amount of leverage software programmers have... and now they have an excuse to end it on a unified front.

That is sufficed to say that many people in our profession don't actually care about software development or programming, they just saw a lucrative career path.

My personal and somewhat bitter opinion is that the profession will be more enjoyable for me once all the people who are only in it for money leave. I can live a blue collar salary life working in tech and still enjoy it. Maybe I'll have less scrum masters and shit. Thank god.

If I thought this would happen I would've done something else with my life. There's still some fun to be had, and I'll probably stay in the industry because it pays well and I have history here, but the magic has largely died.

I essentially have the opposite opinion, you're going to lose people who had a lot of passion and be left with people who are content writing prompts for money.

I agree with you.

My personal take is that the AI era will be a rough brush that will help shed all the accumulated cruft in this profession.

I think highly technical, knowledgable people will remain, and thrive in a few years, and all the rest will move on to the next fad, or whatever pays the most.

The reason a segment of the current market will remain is because LLMs still need steering, we are not at a point where an abstract idea can go from Tweet to product, and we are many many leagues away from that. Of course, this has been noted to oblivion before, so I'm not really providing shocker value at all here.