i was more thinking about art or writing, but if you're doing repetitive menial coding work then there have been tools to replace that for like 50 years.
people who don't care to do those things are using ai for them, leaving the people who do care, and usually spent a large part of their life learning how to do those things well, with nothing to do.
incidentally, learning how to do something properly makes it easier to see how bad ai is at that thing.
if you're working with higher level languages you pass-by-reference all the time. give a list to a function to modify it? that's by reference. giving an event handler function to a framework? that's by reference. setting a property on an object? that's usually by reference.
softbank bought ABB Robotics last year. one of the few big swedish tech companies that hadn't been fully diluted over the years (sure they were part of ABB but they were doing their own thing) get sold to a company that wanted to "bridge the gap between ai and real life". if the robotics division goes down with them i'll be mad.
that sets fire to a tree for every sentence, yes.