I don’t understand the premise: you were hired to do the job, you do the job, tooling improves so you do more job with less resources. It’s a win-win for everyone.
the past has shown that this is not the case.
In addition, there are fewer farmers than there used to be, despite demand not having been static.
As for fewer farmers, that is exactly it - those who would have been farmers would be required to acquire new skills or pursue something other than farming. Bringing this back to AI - artists, writers and programmers who get displaced will need to adapt. In the long term, the massive decrease in costs of production of various "creative" endeavours will produce new industries, new demand and increase overall wealth - even if it is not shared evenly (in the same sense that past technological leaps are also not shared evenly).
Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI either and it's only a matter of time before my day job goes from "rewrite this (web) app from 5-10 years ago" to "rewrite this AI assisted or generated (web) app from 5-10 years ago". But I don't think it's going to cost that many jobs in the long run.
That seems optimistic. It all goes according to plan you won't get to write or rewrite anything anymore. You'll just be QA reviewing AI output. If you find something wrong you don't get to correct it, nobody will pay for coders, you'll just be telling AI about the problem so it can try to correct it until the code passes and the hallucinations are gone. That way they can pay you much less while you help train AI to get better and better at doing your old job.
Don’t will depend if there are many projects with a good outlook sitting around.
Sadly, the current environment does not reflect that in my experience. There is a vicious focus on keeping profit margins at a steady rate at all costs while slashing spend on tooling which requires re-work on solved problems. :/
At some point the music is going to stop and it's not going to be pretty I suspect. :(
That's why you need to keep an eye out, and smell whether the management understands it or not. Plan to leave, as your value contribution will not give you back the reward that such contributions deserve in this type of organization.
NB: Firing 20% of employees requires a 25% increase in efficiency by the simple math.