Creative professionals might take the first hit in professional services, but AI is going to come for engineers at a much faster and more furious pace. I would even go so far as to say that some (probably a small amount) of the people who have recently gotten laid off at big tech companies may never see a paycheck as high as they previously had.
The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams permanently.
Do you have a source for that? Doesn't match my experience unless your definition of maintenance is really broad
On an infinite timeline humans will no longer be needed in the generation of code (we hopefully will still study and appreciate it for leisure), but I doubt we're there yet.
I have the exact, almost completely opposite opinion. Greenfield is where AI going to shine.
Maintenance is riddled with "gotcha's", business context, and legacy issues that were all handled and negotiated over outside of the development workflow.
By contrast, AI can pretty easily generate a new file based on some form of input.
There's been huge improvements in automating maintenance, and yet I've never once heard someone blame a layoff on e.g. clang-rename (which has probably made me 100x more productive at refactoring compared to doing it manually.)
I'd even say your conclusion is exactly backwards. The implicit assumption is that there's a fixed amount of engineering work to do, so any automation means fewer engineers. In reality there is no such constraint. Firms hire when the marginal benefit of an engineer is larger than the cost. Automation increases productivity, causing firms to hire more, not less.