Part of me wants to argue this isn’t a cycle of demand and is instead capitalism. The trades didn’t pay poorly because there were too many people as much as people willing to work for less and the employer will pocket the difference. I admit this is extremely pedantic of me to split hairs here but people have an effective floor for how much they can work for. Coal miners weren’t being told to code because there were too many coal miners but that they could never work for as little as the machines that were replacing them.

To be clear I’m not saying AI is a replacement for programmers, I’m not able to see the future here, but capitalists will attempt to to replace any labor with machines if possible.