its completely over for this field. anyone that doesnt think so has their head in the sand, we are 18 months out from the value proposition of a 50-85th percentile software engineer dropping to the floor
I guess if you spin up fresh CRUD apps or greenfield web apps for a living, you might be in danger, because they are really good at doing that. On an established codebase, especially with more than the low tens of thousands of lines of code, their usefulness is mostly relegated to writing boilerplate that can be explained in plain English. I'd be surprised if 85% of programmers were spending their days doing that, though.
Even if it was that serious, I don't see software engineers who can leverage LLMs and keep learning with the rest of their field being in much danger. The average software shop that I'm familiar with has a massive backlog of things to be done, and more direction than they have steam. We're pretty far from the point where almost any professional programmer will be saying "We finished all our work and there's nothing left to do".
Replacing piles of expensive crappy SaaS with a small team of expert SWE will continue to be a massive arbitrage opportunity for many mid/large orgs.
Year, or two of unpaid internships? It's nothing new. In my country it works like this for doctors or pharmacists - they have to do half a year of unpaid work if they want to get diploma (and I use work and not internship for reason) Because as a junior you don't bring anything of value to company, you're a loss to them.
The GenAI economy transition will be very weird. The (US) education system isn't remotely prepared for it. Why pay a bunch of money for a 4-yr CS degree?
I would say 0% of AI does? What AI can even read production environment vars, find logs in arbitrary parts of the file system, measure usage statistics, and fix the code without causing another bug?