I'm with you 100% of the way on this one. Am coding with Claude 3.5 right now using Aider. The future is clear at this point. It won't get worse and there's still so much low hanging fruit. Expertise is still useful to guide it, but we're all product managers now.
There are a lot more photographers now than there ever were painters, and the size of the industry is much larger than it used to be. It is true that our work will change, but personally I think that's great - I don't enjoy the initial hump that you usually have to overcome before you begin to actually solve real problems, and AI is often able to take me over that hump, or fill in things that don't matter. E.g. I'm a backend person but need a frontend for the demo - I'm able to do that on my own now, without spending days figuring out some harebrained web framework and CSS stack - something I probably wouldn't do at all if there wasn't no AI.
Your analogy fails because the economy still needed human workers to take the photographs whereas there is a possibility that in 5 or 10 years, the economy will have no need and no use for most people.
I work in this field and I would bet that in 5-10 years the situation will not be much different compared to today in terms of employment unless we invent AGI all of a sudden, which I don't see any signs that it'd even remotely happen. Job definitions will change a bit, productivity will improve, cost per LOC will drop, more underserved niches will become tractable/profitable.
