I disagree, I think SWE will be one of the first careers displaced by AI. There is a whole “jobber” class of lower quality SWEs nowadays who are bright enough to do the job, but just barely. The extra pair of hands we needed to help digitize the world.

Once the bulk of the coding can be offset by AI, you probably just need elite SWEs as the check to the system. The lower quality SWEs that fill that extra pair of hands role that we need now will go away because the code they produce will be of inferior quality to the code that AI will produce. They will be an anti-productive variable to the equation and will be gradually lost to attrition.