If you want to thrive in this world you need to change your attitude ASAP. New tech waves happen all of the time. Embracing them is the path.
Don't get high on your own (industry's) supply. This foward-looking BS is targeted at clueless investors, Level 5 self-driving cars have been a "few years away" for almost 2 decades now, and here we are, still having to deal with ADAS like cavemen, and looking back at the trail of dead companies that believed they could solve self-driving.
More great ideas will flow out of that activity.
As for missed the boat, how do you mean? We remain in early days!
Finally, try to avoid making your own reality. You write as if you know the future, and none of us do!
And even when we are right, how we respond to that future really matters!
You could sulk in gloom
, or!
You could be building things and or showing them off.
It is that showing off that nets good new opportunities.
i understand the feeling you have a little bit, but agree with the others that you don't need to despair too much about the industry, there is still a great need (and will be) for humans to understand the systems we are using and be able to get in the weeds to solve problems.
totally agree we might need less people writing/wrangling code, and it might put downward pressure on salaries... on the other hand, there might be upward pressure on salaries as developers will have a higher output and the ROI for hiring an effective developer in this environment will go up. especially when production is on fire, the AI that wrote the code that is on fire might not be the best source of how to solve it.
to me this is all basically a big unknown, without substantial reason to panic though, even if it feels overwhelming and hopeless from a certain perspective at the start of a career. currently a lot of development feels pretty sluggish to me, we fight with build tools and multiple languages and eke out these incremental improvements - if developers can work much much faster, that's great, but then we hit a limit to like... OK we need to let the product changes "settle" for a while and get user feedback about the changes, we can't actually ship 14 major product updates in a week because users will have no idea what the fuck is happening. but maybe we can do more advanced things with rapid split testing and automated success metrics to deploy pages that "self-optimize" or something, and there might be new second and third order ideas that come from this where it takes a human to manage and direct and build and solve things at that level.
> ideas are everywhere, they are cheap. the idea plus the execution, timing, marketing, and approach are all factors in something being successful
And water is everywhere but you need a boat to get across it. I don't think I have a boat. I don't know if I can build one. I don't know if anyone will let me on their boat. s/boat/idea generation/g.