If all the companies that have "pivoted to AI" haven't gone bust by then. That's my main concern, people keep saying "Yes, but in a year they'll have to hire us back to fix everything", but who will hire us back? The companies who have destroyed themselves by wholesale buying into this fad?

Large companies pivoting to their own destruction might not be all bad though. Very few pieces of software are actually unique, and when they are it's often because the big fish having bought and closed the competition.

As an example, let's say Microligarcy, goes a head with their plan to auto slop the Windopoly kernel over to Rust. It will most likely fail miserably, and thereby drive additional Linux adoption.

The richest of the rich are injecting snake oil into their veins. They no longer care if software, or anything else, actually works. They don't even care if the line goes up, because pictures of lines going up are just as good as far as they're concerned.

If get rid of them, maybe we'll survive, and then we will be able to fix things. But that's a big "if".