99% of dev work has already been done before. That's why most modern dev is "Search Google" -> StackOverflow or random blog post -> copy & paste + tweak code
LLMs and AI code completion tools (eg. GitHub Copilot) drastically simplify this even further. In a few years, you'll simply write a prompt and the code will be written for you, infrastructure set up for you, and APIs glued together for you.
The takeaway is that basic app development will be completely commoditized within a few years, and ultimately all dev work will be. Once something has been done once and is understood by AI, then that work is now commoditized.
Developers are the "translator" between someone who wants to build something and the machine. Just like AI will automate human language translators, AI will do the same for machine translators. Of course there will still be humans verifying the AI's output and handling edge cases, but there will be significantly less demand for humans.
For developers to remain employable, they'll need to offer more than commoditized dev services. This means working at the bleeding edge of what hasn't already been done before (eg. building the AI), and/or coupling dev with other skills (eg. product, marketing, management).
Ultimately though it's an arms race where every worker is competing against their irrelevance due to automation, and it's only going to get more and more competitive as AI improves exponentially.
The tech job market sucks now, but I personally don't think it's going to get better. If/when we get back to low interest rates and another market bubble we might see another boom cycle, but long-term things are only going to get more competitive, and the longevity and time relevance of your knowledge will only decrease as tech advances exponentially.
Of course this needn't be a bad thing if our economic system was designed to accommodate automation such as via a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that ensured that job automation doesn't equate to billions of people becoming destitute, but unfortunately such obvious simple policies are beyond the cognitive capacity of politicians, and everyone else is too focused on the arms race of trying to remain economically relevant in the face of AI automation to pay attention to the bigger picture. Or even if most people see the writing on the wall and have identified the solution, actually implementing the solution is a prisoner's dilemma that requires mass collaboration and individually doesn't help you due to the time/energy opportunity cost (your skills are getting outdated as you read this) and it going against the elite's interests as poorer masses = more elite power (eg. imagine how many less OnlyFans girls there'd be if college tuition wasn't so expensive and we had a UBI).
Basically UBI would be the easiest solution to countering the massive job losses that will result from automation, while redesigning our system to have automation work FOR us rather than AGAINST us (since automation then shifts from "oh no I might lose my job" to "cool I don't need to do this menial work anymore thanks to technology"). But supporting UBI means you're lazy and want to be a useless parasite who just collects a paycheck and plays videogames right?
Speaking of which, I need to get back to work before I lose my economic relevance.
https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1686573852770664449
People in power might "logically" conclude that whilst "Lots of Workers" were needed in the "Old Days" before Mass Automation, they are no longer needed and "logically" should be eliminated! Whilst politicians, etc. are obviously not going to voice such views openly, I would bet that such ideas are discussed behind closed doors. TL;DR: Robots controlled (directly or indirectly) by an Elite, may wish to delete you.
What to do? Program your OWN robots, or groups of us get together to program robots that serve the public (or Geeks at least) rather than the "Hidden Elite" ... ??