- The ability and want to learn. I offer the following advice to every firefighter I teach: the day you think or believe you know everything, is the day you quit. (I'm a software dev. by trade with fifteen-odd years experience as an operational firefighter (and still am to this day)).
- Find a domain or two you have an interest (better yet, a passion) in, that isn't IT, and pair your IT skills to it. My day job is (more generally) emergency management, so I pair my geospatial analysis and programming skills to solve problems within the emergency management domain.
I don't think AI will completely take over, simply because of [1], though it will somewhat remove or reduce the need for 'generalists', where much of the workload is handled by AI, at the prompting of a software developer or engineer, much like how many farm hands were replaced by farming machines when they became a thing. That said, I think we're still half a century off AI truly replacing most software developers.
Humans will still be required to 'know what 'good' looks like' and ensure that whatever slop AI spits out actually fixes the problem. This is where domain-specific knowledge is incredibly valuable. See how you can apply your skills to make your interest or passion field better, using AI to your advantage, by exploiting your technical skills with domain-specific knowledge.
Most people think of firefighters as just that - putting out fires. That's only partly true though. We use a shiny, and fast, red toolbox on wheels to solve the problems of others, whether that be (actual) firefighting, rescue, first aid, replacing smoke alarm batteries, engaging with the community, even fixing things. Firefighters now days are closer to problem-solvers than they are firefighters. We just happen to respond to emergency calls too.
Be the problem solver in your domain. AI, in my opinion, won't be able to truly problem solve, or think outside the box, for many decades to come.
[1] https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...