Why weren't programmers worried about free libraries?
Something I've been curious about (in the genuine way, not the trollish "contrarian", see-how-clever-I-am way) is why we never heard programmers fearing for their job security when new libraries were released. Not just new libraries, free libraries, written by elite programmers, that eliminated a lot of demand for programmers. Now we have AI and suddenly the sky is falling. The vast majority of lines of code that don't need to be written are libraries. Even most AI code is nothing more than a glue job on those libraries.
I remember a lot of fear when open source took off 20-30 years ago. The fear there was the change in business model as smaller programming shops didn't know how they'd survive and even Microsoft executives were waking up in the middle of the night worried how they could compete.
This is different from that though. You had capable programmers giving away a free product, whether it was apps or libraries, and this is a tool that requires supervision and prompting and isn't always more profitable than having a programmer do it for you. Whereas free libraries and open source apps were a complete replacement for programmers, AI is a productivity-enhancing tool, so the amount of fear was either too little before or too much now. Maybe they viewed libraries as productivity-enhancing but they view AI as a complete replacement? Maybe it's a supply thing. They viewed the supply of programmers as limited, but they view AI as increasing the supply of programmers.