I'm in my 40s too. I haven't switched roles in ~4 years, and probably won't for the next ~4, 5 years. But I have always painted and drawn as hobby. Seriously considering trying that for a short time during a sabbatical or -- more likely -- find a job as contractor from Mon to Wed, and spend the rest of the time drawing and painting.

If you are concerned about employability then I think going back to school or investing in a masters or some technical courses could be interesting. Or even moving to coordination/leader/engineer roles?

But if you have a hobby, maybe you could consider trying something different like either doing it in parallel, or maybe combining with engineering. e.g. I'm considering something like Blender3D + drawing using Grease pencil. Blender can be programmed with Python too, and this way I'd combine two things that I like.

Go back to school for what though?

I'm 43 and I've been thinking I might just retire if I get laid off and can't find something new. I'm frugal and have enough saved up that I could make it work if I leave my high cost of living area.

I'm not worried about engineering jobs being eliminated. I'm more worried that companies are going to expect insane velocity because of these tools and I'm not going to be able to keep up in part because I care about quality. At my company, the people that use AI to generate the most code seem to get the most recognition.

Many engineers with a long career have probably thought about becoming a manager at one point. A large portion of them decided to stay in the IC (individual contributor) track because they did not like some of the aspects of being a manager. Some decided to stick to the IC role because they liked creating code.

With AI, every engineer will need to become a manager to manager one or more AI assistants who do a lot of the work. The good news is that this will not involve dealing with performance reviews, psychological problems, and raises. You will also remain close to the code.

Look at the manager role again, and see which parts of it will be needed to manage AI agents. Learn those parts from standard management books. You will kind of pivot, but still remain close to the code.

On the other hand, if all you enjoyed is typing in code, but hated working with product people to understand the intent, doing code reviews, or building software that is easy to QA, there will be fewer and fewer such jobs.

Hi! Also in my 40s, 20+ years of experience. I took the coding career because I like solving problems with code. I use agents for one-shot tasks, quickly understand big code bases, finding what I need in messy documentation, have a test suite foundation (things which I always didn't like much). I will continue this way for now because, honestly, if my job has to become reviewing tons of code vomited by an AI the whole day, I'd rather become a bar tender. I won't jump the panic train now just because everyone is obsessed with coding agents. Wait a couple of years, see what will actually remain out of this bubble and then see if and how to pivot, now it's not the time. Indeed if you have interests and budget, do go back to school and reinvent yourself, but that should be a decision independent from the current AI hype.