I agree with everything OP says except "watching all of those years go down the drain." AI might have made it almost meaningless to write code by hand anymore. But the people who have spent years/decades writing code are now in the best position to leverage AI coding tools. Learning to code was a stepping stone toward learning to decompose and solve complex problems. I have worked with a lot of different people with different levels of coding experience. And I can say with confidence that, in general, the more coding experience you have, the better you're positioned to think about long-horizon tasks and to organize and tackle problems with multiple moving parts. All those skills directly translate to using AI coding agents. And I'm seeing it happen in real time. People with long software engineering experience have a totally different way of using AI coding agents (given that they set their ego aside and accept that this is the new norm). They are more organized, know how to steer the agent like guiding an intern or mentoring a junior dev. People who don't have coding experience are using agents in a random and chaotic way (the approach has its outside-the-box-thinking merits but doesn't have the same reliability as the experienced SWE approach).