I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.

Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up.

The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there.

But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.

i’m sure all auditing and qa reasons for human in the loop firmware development will magically go poof soon as well

Quite so. There's literally no moat that can withstand a prospect of 10x cost cut.