The work is going, and mine goes first
I have been telling people for a while that AI is a good tool and that everyone should learn to use it. I still think that. What I have stopped saying is that it will be fine.
My trade is the one at the front of the queue. Writing code, running systems, keeping the lights on for somebody else's business: this is exactly what the current models do well, and it is already happening in my own projects. I am not predicting a cliff. I am describing a slope I can feel under my feet, where a week of my chargeable time quietly becomes a day, and then an afternoon, and the client is pleased, and I am cheaper than I was.
The bargaining bit is what people miss. When the work is scarce, whoever can do it holds the cards, and that is the only real leverage an ordinary working person has. Automation takes the scarcity away. A company can cut the roles and keep the profit, and it does not have to be secretive about it, it says so out loud on an earnings call and in a hiring freeze and in a headcount line. Nobody has to invent a plot. The incentives point the same way for every company big enough to act.
Then there is the personal part, which is harder to write. I am fifty three. I have done this since the early nineties, I am good at it, and I built a life out of it. Being told that the thing you are good at is being absorbed is a strange grief, and the advice always arrives from people whose own seat is safe. Retrain into what, exactly, and how long do I have before that is absorbed too?
I am not packing it in. I am still building, still shipping, still here, and I would rather be honest with the people who follow me than cheerful and wrong about something this size. If the work is going, and mine goes first, then somebody should be saying what that actually feels like while it happens.