How to prepare for AI taking my programming job?

If your job is to write code to specification (basically fill out the functions as instructed), then yes, you may need to be worried.

However, I've never seen a person doing that. The largest part of a dev job is not figuring out what to write, but how to structure the codebase so it doesn't become a nightmare really quickly. I, for one, would appreciate any help writing more code quicker because it would let me spend more time figuring out and fixing architectural problems.

I recently had to jump into a new project without my usual IDE setup of code navigation, interactive debugger, and code analysis and my productivity dropped by 90%. Needless to say, I invested the time to get it working again. When I started working professionally, most codebases were a few thousand lines of code. Now I frequently run into repos with several hundred thousand lines of code. These are sheer impossible to navigate without IDE help.

So no, I don't think AI is going to take the job of anybody I know, it will just make our jobs more efficient and enable us to manage working on even more compex codebases. My advice? Learn how to use an IDE really well.

It depends on so many factors. If I was just out of high school and had the wisdom I had now I would probably take any government job (even if your job is eliminated to A.I they will transfer you somewhere instead of ending your employment usually) or become some sort of nurse/teacher. But I am already deep in tech, doing it for more than 10 years and am 38. So super hard to know what to do now for someone like me. I plan to keep at it since I earn a lot and at the same time start thinking about plan B. That includes - 1. keep working on people skills since that the last thing that will be automated probably. 2. embrace stoicism. It's never been more relevant but any system (be it religion or something else) will help. 3. keep a cool head. Some A.I predictions (autonomous cars) turned out to be quite inaccurate. We may have 20 more years of work ahead of us, or we may not.

Hope this helps!

Stopping to care.

This may be a bit cynical, but stopping to care. While I tend to not be so optimistic with the timeline, I'm confident in the end result. And while I firmly believe that the end result will not be as dramatic in terms of unemployment as many people make it out to be - it never was historically speaking (admittedly, developments seem slightly different) - not everyone can come out a "survivor" of this selection round.

That being said, although AI makes it easier, it doesn't make everything. Developing software will continue to require a fair bit of knowledge and experience, even (or especially) with AI based tools. So you best bet would likely be to embrace those AI tools as a superpower if you can. If you ask me, software development will likely be among the last office jobs to be automated in any significant way.

And if you're open to switching careers: getting into any kind of trade will basically guarantee that AI will not put you out of a job within the coming decades.