I agree with you and have similar thoughts (maybe, unfortunately for me). I personally know people who outsource not just their work, but also their life to LLMs, and reading their exciting comments makes me feel a mix of cringe, fomo and dread. But what is the engame for me and you likes, when we finally would be evicted from our own craft? Stash money while we still can, watching 'world crash and burn', and then go and try to ascend in some other, not yet automated craft?
Yeah, that's a good question that I can't stop thinking about. I don't really enjoy much else other than building software, its genuinely my favorite thing to do. Maybe there will be a world where we aren't completely replaced, we have handmade clothes still after all that are highly coveted. I just worry its going to uproot more than just software engineering, theoretically it shouldn't be hard to replace all low hanging fruit in the realm of anything that deals with computer I/O. Previous generations of automation have created new opportunities for humans, but this seems mostly just as a means of replacement. The advent of mass transportation/vehicles created machines who needed mechanics (and eventually software), I don't see that happening in this new paradigm.
I don't think that's going to make society very pleasant if everyone's fighting over the few remaining ways to make livelihood. People need to work to eat. I certainly don't see the capitalist class giving everyone UBI and letting us garden or paint for the rest of our lives. I worry we're likely going to end up in trenches or purged through some other means.
If you want to know where it's headed, look at factory workers 40 years ago. Lots of people still work at factories today, they just aren't in the same places they were 40 years ago and now req an entirely different skill set.
The largest ongoing expense of every company is labor and software devs are some of the highest paid labor on the planet. AI will eventually drive down wages for this class of workers most likely by shipping these jobs to people in other countries where labor is much cheaper. Just like factory work did.
Enjoy the good times while they last (or get a job at an AI company).