Unlike the replies here I will be very honest with my answer. There will be less engineers getting hired as the low hanging fruit has already been picked and automated away.
It is not too late. These LLMs still need very specialist software engineers that are doing tasks that are cutting edge and undocumented. As others said Software Engineering is not just about coding. At the end of the day, someone needs to architect the next AI model or design a more efficient way to train an AI model.
If I were in your position again, I now have a clear choice of which industries are safe against AI (and benefit software engineers) AND which ones NOT to get into (and are unsafe to software engineers):
It is not too late. These LLMs still need very specialist software engineers that are doing tasks that are cutting edge and undocumented. As others said Software Engineering is not just about coding. At the end of the day, someone needs to architect the next AI model or design a more efficient way to train an AI model.
If I were in your position again, I now have a clear choice of which industries are safe against AI (and benefit software engineers) AND which ones NOT to get into (and are unsafe to software engineers):
Do:
Don't: The choice is yours.