They will work their senior devs to death, continuously offering more money to forgo their retirement until the AI can replace them and eventually code becomes a lost language to us that only the machines can understand.

I mean, the answer is simple. You teach people how to code better. That is literally the point of education - to teach people to do things so they don't have to learn on the job via trial and error.

Even if there wasn't AI taking people's jobs, what left is there to develop?

It feels like there already was a natural contraction of the industry after the increase in interest rates. I feel like AI is more of a smoke screen for executives to justify loss of headcount.