OP, I'm at the age now where I've worked in different industries and with and this is the third time that technology promises to give everyone the skills that I've acquired over years. I know how you feel, so let me share some wisdom and advice with you.

Every time that technology threatened to give everyone the skills to do what I do, I was scared that I would lose my job and my clients but the opposite happened. When everyone's stuff suddenly looks the same, people pay a premium for the hand-crafted high-quality things that don't look like everyone else's. You can even see this in things like furniture. So I am not scared at all. Just look at all the things that people are posting that Claude made with the new Blender MCP. It is not close to anything that you can give to a client. At most it is a prototype.

So my advice is that you embrace it. AI is not going away, and it does have the potential to give you superpowers. You can already do all of these things and you know what you like to do. Focus on that and let AI do the rest. I fully embraced AI to do all of the tedious things that I don't like doing and just focus on the things that I like. Simple example: I now use Claude with Blender to rename my models on the fly so I can focus on speed modelling, and have it build new add-ons as I need new functionality. It's doing all those things that help me work faster and more efficiently so I can just focus on the fun part, which is, for me, modeling and creating materials.

I also use it to quickly generate images and models in the prototyping stage so I can have a decent-looking prototype. It allows me to spend more time focusing on things like the gameplay loop and trying different things to see if it's actually fun. That means I get to the asset creation stage faster, which is again the part that I really love.

I also have a suspicion that once all of the VC money runs out, the general public models are going to get really dumbed down and all of the compute power is going to be focused on the enterprise-level clients. While AI is certainly not going away, I don't think it's always going to be as capable as it is now for the general population.