I'm 15 years in, so a little behind you, but this is also some observations from the perspective of a student during the Post-Dot-Com bust.

A great parallel of today's LLMs was the Outsourcing mania from 20 years ago. It was worse than AGI because actual living breathing thinking people would write your code. After the Dot-Bomb implosion, a bunch of companies turned to outsourcing as a way to skirt costs for expensive US programmers. In their mind, a manager can produce a spec that was sent to an oversees team to implement. A "Prompt" if you will. But as time wore on, the hype wore off with every broken and spaghettified app. Businesses were stung back into hiring back programmers, but not before destroying a whole pipeline of CS graduates for many years. It fueled a surge in demand in programmers against a small supply that didn't abate until the latter half of the 2010s.

Like most things in life, a little outsourcing never hurt anybody but a lot can kill your company.

> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear

Agree with some qualifications. I think LLMs will follow a similar disillusionment as outsourcing, but not before decimating the profession in both headcount and senior experience. The pipeline of Undergrad->Intern/Jr->Mid->Sr development experience will stop, creating even more demand for the existing (and now dwindling) senior talent. If you can rough it for the next few years the employee pool will be smaller and businesses will ask wHeRe dId aLl tHe pRoGrAmMeRs gO?! just like last time. We're going to lose entire classes of CS graduates for years before companies reverse course, and then it will take several more years to steward another generation of CS grads through the curriculum.

AI companies sucking up all the funding out of the room isn't helping with the pipeline either.

In the end it'll be nearly a decade before the industry recovers its ability to create new programmers.

> So, fellow software engineers, how do you future-proof your career in light of, the inevitable, LLM take over?

Funnily enough, probably start a business or that cool project you've had in the back of your mind. Now is the time to keep your skills sharp. LLMs are good enough to help with some of those rote tasks as long as you are diligent.

I think LLMs will fit into future tooling as souped-up Language Servers and be another tool in our belt. I also foresee a whole field of predictive BI tools that lean on LLMs hallucinating plausible futures that can be prompted with (for example) future newspaper headlines. There's also tons of technical/algorithmic domains ruled by Heuristics that could possibly be improved by the tech behind LLMs. Imagine a compiler that understands your code and applies more weight on some heuristics and/or optimizations. In short, keeping up with the tools will be useful long after the hype train derails.

People skills are perennially useful. It's often forgotten that programming is two domains; the problem domain and the computation domain. Two people in each domain can build Mechanical Sympathy that blurs the boundaries between the two. However the current state of LLMs does not have this expertise, so the LLM user must grasp both the technical and problem domains to properly vet what the LLMs return from a prompt.

Also keep yourself alive, even if that means leaving the profession for something else for the time being. The Software Engineer Crisis is over 50 years old at this point, and LLMs don't appear to be the Silver Bullet.

tl;dr: Businesses saw the early 2000s and said "More please, but with AI!" Stick it out in "The Suck" for the next couple of years until businesses start demanding people again. AI can be cool and useful if you keep your head firmly on your shoulders.