Many people are already using automated tax preparation tools. Yet tax preparers are still needed.
There are already customer support chatbots. Yet people often want to talk to a representative.
A smarter versions of those will probably be game changers but for high-stakes situations you will still want to deal with a human expert.
If you have an infected limb that is at risk of being amputated, will you go see DoctorGPT? Hell no.
Chatbots for customer support never worked right, so it wasn’t a choice either. With gpt-powered bots, many - if not most will choose that over calling a helpline.
The job of lawyers and doctors are less predictable than software engineers? I don't believe that for a second.
If AI comes for SWE jobs it's coming for a hell of a lot more white collar jobs as well.
Generative AI throws the switch in reverse, because it's indifferent to standardization: people are formulating questions about data and how to process it in their native tongues, skipping the encoding process and the need to study documentation altogether. There isn't a point where it becomes, "oh, but then you hit a brick wall and have to learn the real stuff to solve your problem". GPT helps relatively less as you go deeper and further away from a SO-type answer, but it's a gradual decay.
99% of the code that you can generate via ChatGPT can be already be found in the form of an open source library, already packaged and ready to use. The number of libraries to solve various problems continues to grow each day.
Many of the questions you can ask to ChatGPT, if not already present in a project documentation, have been already asked on Stack Overflow, mailing lists, etc. and indexed by search engines. Typing a well formulated question in a search engine may likely take you to a valid answer these days.
When taking that into consideration, that leaves us with a very different narrative. LLMs can make a difference, but software engineers have been already reusing solutions to save effort for many decades now.
There are already programming languages that are close to natural language such as SQL and BASIC. Did the release of those mean the end of software? no. Each time programming gets easier, the result is often more programmers.
Finally, there are many expert developers on freelancing sites such as Upwork that you can hire, are "generally intelligent" beyond ChatGPT, and perhaps will cost you less than paying for OpenAI tokens. Still, organizations choose to hire software engineers.