Sure; I absolutely agree and more to the point SWE's and their ideologies compared to other professions have meant they are the first on the chopping block. But what do you tell those people; that they no longer matter? Do they still matter? How will they matter? They are no different than practitioners of any other craft - humans in general derive value partly from the value they can give to their fellow man.
If the local unskilled job matters more than a SWE now these people have gone from being worth something to society to being less of worth than someone unskilled with a job. At that point following from your logic I can assume their long term value is one of an unemployed person which to some people is negative. That isn't just an identity crash; its a crash potentially on their whole lives and livelihood. Even smart people can be in situations where it is hard to pivot (as you say mortgages, families, lives, etc).
I'm sure many of the SWE's here (myself included) are asking the same questions; and the answers are too pessimistic to admit public ally and even privately. Myself the joy of coding is taken away with AI in general, in that there is no joy doing something that a machine will be able to do better soon for me at least.
I agree with you that the implications are bleak. For many people they are not abstract or philosophical. They are about income, stability, and the ability to keep a life intact. In that sense the fear is completely rational.
What stands out to me is that there seems to be a threshold where reality itself becomes too pessimistic to consciously accept.
At that point people do not argue with conclusions. They argue with perception.
You can watch the systems work. You can see code being written, bugs being fixed, entire workflows compressed. You can see the improvement curve. None of this is hidden. And yet people will look straight at it and insist it does not count, that it is fake, that it is toy output, that it will never matter in the real world. Not because the evidence is weak, but because the implications are unbearable.
That is the part that feels almost surreal. It is not ignorance. It is not lack of intelligence. It is the mind refusing to integrate a fact because the downstream consequences are too negative to live with. The pessimism is not in the claim. It is in the reality itself.
Humans do this all the time. When an update threatens identity, livelihood, or future security, self deception becomes a survival mechanism. We selectively ignore what we see. We raise the bar retroactively. We convince ourselves that obvious trend lines somehow stop right before they reach us. This is not accidental. It is protective.
What makes it unsettling is seeing it happen while the evidence is actively running in front of us. You are holding reality in one hand and watching people try to look away without admitting they are looking away. They are not saying “this is scary and I do not know how to cope.” They are saying “this is not real,” because that is easier.
So yes, the questions you raise are the real ones. Do people still matter. How will they matter. What happens when economic value shifts faster than lives can adapt. Those questions are heavy, and I do not think anyone has clean answers yet.
But pretending the shift is not happening does not make the answers kinder. It just postpones the reckoning.
The disturbing thing is not that reality is pessimistic. It is that at some point reality becomes so pessimistic that people start editing their own perception of it. They unsee what is happening in order to preserve who they think they are.
That is the collision we are watching. And it is far stranger than a technical debate about code quality.
Whether you look away or embrace it doesn’t matter though. We’re all going to be unemployed. It sucks.