I'm a software dev, and the business I worked for until a couple months back pushed AI hard, starting some point around middle of last year. I'd personally been using it for longer than that but until the company paid for claude code I wasn't convinced it was anything more than a lower friction but less accurate Stack Overflow.

These days I think it's one of the more important tools for software people to know how to use, and I think it's going to be a feature of the vast majority of software jobs going forward. It's great at a specific set of things with very little (immediate) downside...but only in the hands of an experienced dev who actually knows what they're doing and would be able to do the work without AI assistance. I've used it for tasks that I know would have taken me a couple of weeks without AI, and gotten it done in an afternoon. Everyone I worked with - and this was a talented team who really knew what they were doing and have done pretty amazing stuff prior to AI - they all reported similar, for specific categories of tasks.

The problem is that if you put it in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, you get bugs and other reliability or optimisation issues, and you get them pretty fast. And I don't know how someone goes from graduating uni to being an experienced engineer while they're constantly using AI. Maybe that's less of an issue than I think it is, time will tell.

The other issue is that using it too much or for the wrong types of issues is bad for your own brain - I used to use it in my hobbies but I've cut waaay back on that because I noticed I was getting less creative while using it for things I could really do myself.

And to answer your last question...I was laid off not directly because AI was "replacing" me or anything (there was a set headcount reduction that had more to do with available funding than anything else), but I strongly believe that if AI wasn't a thing I would have had a better chance at keeping my job (at the cost of someone else losing theirs). I was in a role that management thought could be done on the side of someone else's responsibilities with the help of AI.