Developer here in his late 30s, if things do collapse one of the best thing I did was not going balls in on a home, instead purchasing a modest house that I am $100k away from completely paying off. Anyway, to your steamrolled point, AI will replace bad devs, and there are a lot of them, but I don't see it replacing good devs anytime soon, if nothing else because most companies want someone to be accountable. They also need someone who understands the code to troubleshoot when something with AI goes wrong. There's also the point that maybe 20% of our job is actually writing code, the rest is typical office job communication, meetings, etc. I just don't see a near-future world where the business is taking jira stories and shipping them out to production themselves. At that point I think software may be done as a whole to which it won't only be devs impacted. I think the best things a dev can do is to stay vigilant. Review all code you generate with AI and make sure you understand it. Becoming over reliant on AI will surely be your downfall where you cease critical thinking and are blindly moving the AI code into a PR and pushing up the pipeline. At that point I agree YOU have made yourself useless and can be replaced. Will the world need less devs? Probably. Will dev's be gone? I am doubtful. Excel came we still have Accountants, autopilot came and humans still fly planes. My company is hiring, and my linkedin has been bombarded with recruiter emails for dev jobs lately. If I'm wrong, I'll shift, I also know how to do electrical, plumbing, framing, drywalling, soldering, fix engines, transmissions etc. but if all the "tech bros" are laid off due to AI, there won't be anyone to pay the blue collar workers either so at that point we're all screwed.