My day job, but I am not a software developer (I'm a teacher), although I was in the past.
I can appreciate that perspective, but at the same time: it's a job, the whole arrangement is you sign away your autonomy, you do what you're told, and people were paid more in one year than I've made in 5 for this. Now the balance has been disrupted, and that's a shame, but the gravy train can't go forever. Moreover, this particular job, software developer, has changed fundamentally again and again over the years, and those changes definitely disrupted people's careers, so although the blast radius is significant, this too shall pass.
And we're not exactly talking about doctor-level of training here, it was only about a dozen years ago that it was very fashionable to land a 6-figure salary at a top Silicon Valley tech firm after having only attended a bootcamp, for a job that was characterized as being a "code monkey". The whole thesis of the "Theil Fellowship" was that the job was doable without any formal education at all. At my institution, the CS major was the most popular because it was the shortest path to the largest salary. Now that equation has changed, no one wants to be a CS major, enrollment is through the floor.
> you're feeding prompts into an AI and passing on the responses.
Okay but is the job writing code or building software? A lot of people seem to think the job was writing code, and that's what they liked about it, but it was always the case that if you like your job it's not going to pay well. That software engineers were paid so well to do something they love is an aberration, not something to expect forever.
As a teacher, I definitely understand this. I love my job, doesn't pay well, and it's also changed fundamentally as well in the last year. So I empathize -- I used to grade student papers which was rewarding; then all of a sudden I was grading LLM output, which is not. A lot of my colleagues have complained endlessly about this, have made it their job to become the LLM "police", or have quit the profession entirely because like you said it's not how they started in this field. It's bleak.
But you can also adapt to the times. We just completed a module where students use AI to create games in Lua, and they made the best games I've seen in years, each one different and unique and fun. Before the class was "we'll spend 4 weeks and hopefully we'll get to animations if we're lucky". Now the final projects are all animated with interesting gameplay mechanics, graphics, animations, and they're all different despite them each using AI. I like this situation better.