In many cases developers are a low expectation commodity. In those cases I strongly believe humans are entirely replaceable by AI and I am saying that as somebody with an exceptionally low opinion of LLMs.
Honestly though, when that replacement comes there is no sympathy to be had. Many developers have brought this upon themselves. For roughly the 25 year period from 1995 to 2020 businesses have been trying to turn developers into mindless commodities that are straight forward to replace. Developers have overwhelmingly encouraged this and many still do. These are the people who hop employers every 2 years and cannot do their jobs without lying on their resumes or complete reliance on a favorite framework.
I find myself wondering about your story, and would love it if you would elaborate more. I have gotten some use out of LLMs, and have been quite involved in training a few compute intensive (albeit domain-specific) ones.
Maybe it's the way you talk about 'developers'. Nothing I have seen has felt like the sky falling on an industry; to me at most it's been the sky falling on a segment of silicon valley.
It’s all about perspectives. In many cases the perspectives between how a developer identifies their level of participation versus what they actually do as a work activity differ substantially. For example many developers may refer to themselves as engineers when they have done nothing remotely close to measurements, research, or policy creation in compliance attainment.
With that out of the way let’s look only at what many developers actually do. If a given developer only uses a framework to put text on screen or respond to a user interaction then they can be replaced. LLMs can already do this better than people. That becomes substantially more true after accounting for secondary concerns: security, accessibility, performance, regression, and more.
If a developer is doing something more complex that accounts for systems analysis or human behavior then LLMs are completely insufficient.
Honestly though, when that replacement comes there is no sympathy to be had. Many developers have brought this upon themselves. For roughly the 25 year period from 1995 to 2020 businesses have been trying to turn developers into mindless commodities that are straight forward to replace. Developers have overwhelmingly encouraged this and many still do. These are the people who hop employers every 2 years and cannot do their jobs without lying on their resumes or complete reliance on a favorite framework.