As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries: their skills are now that much more in demand.
But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the course, or go off in an entirely different direction?
Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of the real inflection point where all white collar work can be accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.
Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current) strengths and weaknesses.
That doesn't mean it isn't and won't continue to be disruptive. Looking at generated film clips, it's beyond impressive... and despite limitations, it's going to lead to a lot of creativity, that doesn't mean someone making something longer won't have to work that much harder to get something consistent... I've enjoyed a lot of the StarWars fan films that have been made, but there's a lot of improvements needed in terms of the voice acting, sets, characters, etc that arre needed for something I'd pay to rent or see in a thaater.
Ironically, the push towards modern progressivism and division from Hollywood has largely been a shortfall... If they really wanted to make money, they'd lean into pop-culture fun and rah rah 'Merica, imo. Even with the new He-Man movie, the biggest critique is they bothered to try to integrate real world Earth as a grounding point. Let it be fantasy. For that matter, extend the delay from theater to PPV even. "Only in theaters for 2026" might actually be just enough push to get butts in seats.
I used to go to the movies a few times a month, now it's been at least a year since I've thought of going. I actually might for He-Man or the Spider-Man movies... Mixed on Mandalorean.
For AI and coding... I've started using it more the past couple months... I can't imagine being a less experienced dev with it. I predict, catch and handle so many issues in terms of how I've used it even. The thought of vibe-coded apps in the wild is shocking to terrifying and I wouldn't wany my money anywhere near them. It takes a lot of iteration, curation an baby-sitting after creating a good level of pre-documentation/specifications to follow. That said, I'd say I'm at least 5x more productive with it.
challenge accepted