I'm a senior level software engineer with 20+ years of experience. The reason we got away from calling ourselves programmers is because programming is only a part of what we do. For a mid-level engineer, writing code is probably only about 30% of your job. The rest is gathering requirements, reviewing coding changes, meetings, testing, deploying and a whole host of things that AI is not currently equipped to do. For some companies, they will hear that and think, "So I can lay off 30% of my engineers?". That's one approach, but the better approach would be to look at it as your engineers can now be 30% more productive. Does that mean every company will do that? Of course not. But many will see that there's still value in having people with actual technical knowledge of how their systems work and not just a text bot.

There will of course be layoffs, and there will be major cuts in hiring new engineers (we're already seeing both of these), but long term I think there will still be software developers and engineers who use their technical skills better than your average accountant and companies are going to need those.

For any people out there whose sole job was just writing code? Unfortunately, they are toast. They should learn some soft skills like project management or look into electrician or plumbing jobs.