I already consider myself redundant. As a developer commodity at least.
Personally, I started aligning myself with revenue functions several years ago.
You may not actually be redundant, but it doesn’t matter what reality is. The personal beliefs of the ones paying your paycheck are what matter above all else.
If they believe you can be replaced by the spawn of scam altman, that’s what’ll happen. Doesn’t matter if they’re being gaslit.
Probably something that shares similar properties to software engineering in terms of creative problem solving and critical thinking. So, I think I would probably want to dabble more into game development; maybe creating physical games (ttrpgs, card games, board games, etc). I also always kinda liked writting, so maybe there’s something there for me.
Well, if you are really just a relay (which doubt it’s the case for most people) and are not actively adding any additional context or value on top of the agent (aka just a Meat Proxy), I guess you are pretty much out of luck, because that’s definetely not sustainable in the new market (this reminds me of some annoying low effort react videos you see on social media).
However, I would argue that even then, you could still provide your time and attention (or taste) as a resource. The reality is that someone still has to get stuff done and not everyone wants to do it.
Unless of course, models become so capable and cheap that you can just materialize whatever you need on demand everytime. In that case maybe having something custom or curated wouldn’t even make sense anymore, but I don’t know how the economics would play out in this case*.
*IMO, at this point I would be much more concerned about the general impact of the tech in society as a whole than just software engineering, because that’s a totally different reality 
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I recently bought a small farm. I’ve also been toying with physical computing for a few years using microcontrollers and SBCs like Arduino and Khadas with GRiSP in sight.
I plan to devote more time to experimenting with automated and intelligent greenhouse farming. Hopefully, I’ll develop effective new tools for growing healthy organic food for both home and commercial use.
I count myself as one of the “focus on higher level stuff” people. I really do like the idea of being an overall “knowledge worker” with a math/logic specialization who can dance with LLMs better than the people around me and that’s how I make money.
To answer the thread’s question: while I did enjoy writing code by hand, that was never the grail for me. For me, the really exciting part was building things and seeing them come to life. The code was fun, but it was a means to an end. The end was always creating a project.
I guess I’m okay with all the AI stuff going on because it lets me realize my visions faster. Of course, if it gets to the point where your average product manager can just prompt what they want and they no longer need me, that might be a problem. But I strongly suspect that people with strong analytical/reasoning skills are going to be able to do stuff with AI that others can’t.
Basically, once all the “coding” has been outsourced to machines, this job doesn’t get easier. It actually gets harder, because the constraint is no longer a learnable, crystallized skill. Now the constraint is just your native judgment and fluid intelligence.
So if I’m “made redundant” – and in my estimation, I already have been – then my next move is to ask myself for a vision I can realize with AI.
I’ll attempt an answer to the topic question. 
Nothing really changes too much for me if I’m made redundant by AI. I’m a self-taught software engineer who programmed as a hobby for 8ish years before going pro, so this career was never a given for me in the first place. I also have no college degree, but I’ve managed to break into professional fields that normally require one three times (Quality Control, then Taxes/Accounting, now Software Engineering). I’m supremely confident in my ability to adapt and get **** done in the sense that I can figure out how to get through life regardless of what my current industry throws at me.
What will change for me is my current lifestyle. I can’t make the kind of money I can make as a SWE doing anything else, and going back to physical labor would be hard now that I’m past 30 and accustomed to desk work, but I can figure something out.
I would love to enjoy my job, and I do enjoy my dev job since dev was a hobby for me before it paid my rent, but I cut my professional teeth moving freight and getting burned by battery acid for slightly above minimum wage. Most of my professional life was spent working for a paycheck with other people who were working for a paycheck. No one at those jobs showed up to work expecting to be able to do something they enjoyed. We showed up to work expecting to get at least one injury and then go home smelling like a dead body with an egg on it dumped into a sewer.
All that being said, I feel incredibly privileged to be able to secure my livelihood with my mind from the comfort of my own home while doing something I genuinely enjoy, and I would definitely do everything I could to stay in SWE if I lost my job even if I lost the enjoyment I feel for development due to changes to the industry. But that’s because it’s the best option I have, not because it’s the only option I have. I am somewhat worried about this stuff actually. Since I don’t like the idea of going back to my work being just a means to sustain myself, but for anyone worried about their career, just remember that you don’t have to enjoy your work. It’s great if you can, but it doesn’t have to be your identify. You learned to program. That was really hard. You can learn to do whatever programming adjacent thing the industry might make you do in the future, and you can always just put in your 8 hours, get your bag, and spend your evenings and weekends with your friends and family. I believe in you. (might be talking to myself a bit here as a coping mechanism )
I guess to summarize: SWE is a job. And that’s okay.
I am ok letting agents write the code. I’d need to be disciplined enough so I still understand the code I am maintaining. However this doesn’t seem sustainable. Lots of founders and CEOs are thrilled about productivity boosts preaching that the era of coding is over but not every company can afford each employee spending roughly 2-5k usd monthly in tokens. Also, switching to a personal setup with Chinese models running local you’re far from the “competence” and speed you had at work because of obvious LLM limitations. Of course, you can still pay a top tier model to run your side projects but that’s not the reality for everyone. I wish agentic coding was more accessible to everyone so we could all transition to the vision-mode some always wanted together.
Hopefully someday someone will find a more efficient way to train LLMs so we don’t need so much computer processing..
I mean, that just becomes part of the fully-loaded cost of an employee. It’s not all payroll. They already spend thousands monthly on benefits, insurance, a new Macbook for the new developer, study/internet stipends, stuff that gets expensed… Token spend just becomes part of the fully loaded cost. Why wouldn’t it?
I guess that means contract work starts paying less, or pays the same and becomes BYOAI. But in either case, it’s one more expense.
The biggest reason I’m not super worried about AI in the long-term is that it’s not economically feasible to use it the way people are fantasizing about, so eventually, things will calm down.
The problem though is that many companies will try anyway (and seemingly already are trying), so in the short-term, I am worried about these things I guess.
Also, the blast radius for this bubble bursting is gonna be pretty bad it seems. 
Yeah. Maybe that would be counted as expense. Enterprise companies might not give you a ceiling but certainly small startup would do?
Bottom line is: if you want to become a super skilled AI orchestrator managing hundreds of agents, you’ll need a ton of money or a company to pay for your tokens.
People working in small companies and/or don’t have a decent computer might just be watching rich guys running frontier models and saying the era of writing code is over.
Also, I wonder what if AI narrows the line on what’s ethically allowed for you to build.