My guess, the people most worried were never really good at their job and easy to replace.
The better S.E. know that silly business people may replace them with AI at first, then quickly realize they have NO IDEA on how to describe what the business needs.
I dealt with these people, they think they can describe their business in just a few words and get angry when you ask for more details, I can just imagine the mess they will make when a piece of software they THINK they own starts to ask detailed questions.
If you only need to keep the "better software engineer" and can replace the rest with AI that'll still be a drastic cull... we may very well end up with a degree of that.
It is my understanding the the GEOS system was developed on a more powerful machine than the C64/Atari computers it was used on. This let then have the entire code in memory and then processed for common functions. They could not do this on the the 64K-8 bit computers at the time.
This does far more than I did back in my PET and then Amiga days, but one thing I did was write a multi-pass compiler. Each pass at first found ways to make the come better (usually smaller so it ran faster). Even simple code I wrote could see a 10-20% improvement.
Of-course, this is because the original code was quick and dirty. I wonder what improvement modern compilers could have added.
Geez, 25 years ago I was being boggled by how sophisticated was the code generated by the C compiler we shipped at SGI. For the MIPS architecture, as for most contemporary architectures, re-ordering memory accesses to minimize cache misses was FAR more important to execution speed than the specific selection of machine instructions.
Of course for early MIPS there were little things like, don't put a jump in the last word of a 4K page... :-(
All I know. When I ask the business people what they want the program to do, the answer is so vague that any working program you write has a 99% chance of not being what they want.
Of-course the answer is to ask more questions, but I also know how these business people tend to think, they expect magic. A person who is a programmer can keep asking questions, but a machine? They will try to turn it off after a little while.
Good luck getting the EGO head that too many business head are to answer questions.
And if the job is move to someone lower in the organization, the answer to 50% of the questions asked will be 'I don't know.".
The better S.E. know that silly business people may replace them with AI at first, then quickly realize they have NO IDEA on how to describe what the business needs.
I dealt with these people, they think they can describe their business in just a few words and get angry when you ask for more details, I can just imagine the mess they will make when a piece of software they THINK they own starts to ask detailed questions.