I don't know what derails it, I just know that the line on the chart going up or down rarely goes straight. AI might finally be the thing that results in permanent exponential growth and not a sigmoid, or maybe it hits some limits. Maybe those limits are on the human side(our ability to use it, regulatory, social backlash, etc). Maybe management tries to cut out the tech folks only to result in a tangled mess of crap that only we can help them untangle? Maybe the folks with background knowledge will suddenly be needed en masse to control and leverage AI?

We are, for example, about to grow the reach of tech even further thanks to AI. A large percentage of future warfare, for instance, will now be taken over by tech. If humanoid robots get gud, there's a whole 'nother world of applications that will probably need people to specify, test, improve, etc.

Sure, on the one hand I think the value of writing code will probably go to zero in ten years(although some applications explicitly forbid AI coding like some critical infra or space stuff), but writing code is a small part of many SWE's jobs. AI currently still needs to be told what to build and how to make a cohesive, sensible product. Maybe that changes, maybe it doesn't. But the path to eliminating human work is not short or clear-cut.