My non-tech friends will not suddenly be able to run servers or oversee AI systems. They will come to me with their ideas and I will turn the crank. My role will probably be named differently, something like "Intent Manager" or "Architecture Developer" or whatever but I have a strong feeling much of it will basically remain the same. The politics, the egos, the personality differences, AI has changed nothing in that regard. The jocks will not suddenly sit in front of laptops prompting Claude to debug their MQTT setups. You can say AI will do that and sure it will, prompted by me. If AI will do it autonomously then we're all fucked and I don't care about my "career" by that point. It'll be survival of the species time.

Much of accounting could have been automated. A good friend of mine has been manually entering paper receipts and whatever for well over 20 years now and his work load has actually increased. It's all automatable, but there are so. much. more. levers. Possible != will happen.

I do agree it's not the time to empty your savings account. Get ready for some rough times.

Say you are Anthropic and want to shake up the world of law or medicine or whatever. What will you need? Product managers? You need tooling, software, infrastructure and a lot of it and quickly and you need to iterate really F fast on it as well.

If you automate the development of software itself you will enter a new era in which automation of All The Things becomes an engineering problem instead of a pipe dream. Besides software engineering there is (AI) research/science and robotics. That is the holy trinity. Crack that and it's over.

BTW: "double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency", these all sound like solved problems and also things that are festering with accidental instead of essential complexity. I won't bet my career on those things. Now if you say something like physics or geology, that's a tougher nut to crack.