Both things can be true.

I expect to be surprised by specific headlines, but I don't expect "software engineer" to be any more common a job opening than "steam locomotive engineer" in 10 years time.

Conversely, I would be very surprised if the robotics startups turn out to have solved general-purpose AI models that work in the real world, both fast enough and cheap enough (currecy or joules) to be significantly labour-displacing in 10 years.

Where I'm about 50-50 on which of "AI does it" or "AI does't do it" is more surprising, is specific physics research from AI. LLMs can do a lot of hard maths, there's lots of open problems in physics due to hard maths questions. So:

  Consider the Alcubierre metric. The original is impossible. Can an LLM either design something in the same broad category which is physically instantiable but still useful (e.g. "yes it's sub-light but it manages 0.01c and you weren't getting that otherwise"), or prove this is impossible when limited to matter made from normal electrons, protons, and neutrons?