IMO software engineering has a solid 5-10 years left.

Afterwards, you better be in the top 10% of engineers, or be doing something novel like research.

I think you either need to specialize in something quite niche, or work on really hard problems where the main hurdle is problem solving and not coding CRUD apps, or work on legacy systems where the hurdle is understanding twenty years of garbage code, or get closer to product management so you can direct a much more automated programming process

I agree. Specialists who understand (or even do) cutting edge research will be in demand, because LLM's need existing data to train on for good performance. People who can talk to different stakeholders, and deeply understand the company and its business domain will probably be also needed for requirements gathering and management. But the average programmer who writes CRUD apps or integrations like millions of others, and converts fairly refined requirements to code, they will likely impacted very much.

> specialize in something quite niche

Always a gamble.

I would advise instead, get very good at learning, understanding complex systems deeply, adapting, and moving quickly.

We're entering the fasting changing landscape of engineering we've ever seen.

Be someone that can quickly get up to speed and excel regardless of the task.