I’m hitting 42 soon and thinking about what makes a stable, interesting career for the next 20 years. I’ve spent the last 10 years primarily in Linux-based web server management—load balancers, AWS, and Kubernetes. I’m good with Terraform and Ansible, and I hold CKA, CKAD, and AWS Solutions Architect Associate certifications (did it mostly to learn and it helped). I’m not an expert in any single area, but I’m good across the stack. I genuinely enjoy learning or poking around—Istio, Cilium, observability tooling—even when there’s no immediate work application.

Here’s my concern: AI is already generating excellent Ansible playbooks and Terraform code. I don’t see the value in deep IaC expertise anymore when an LLM can handle that. I figure AI will eventually cover around 40% of my current job. That leaves design, architecture, and troubleshooting—work that requires human judgment. But the market doesn’t need many Solutions Architects, and I doubt companies will pay $150-200k for increasingly commoditized work. So where’s this heading? What’s the actual future for DevOps/Platform Engineers?​​​​​​​​