On your point about a consultancy; many of the software dev consultancies will dry up w.r.t work. There won't be success as you state -> after all if your consultancy can do it so can an LLM so why do I need you as the middleman? After all just get Claude/Gemini/etc to do it for small things; you are already seeing this effect in things like graphic design, copywriting and other small creative skills. For large things with large complexity and judgement you need domain experts and guardrails again and other non-coding jobs -> that slows things down considerably so but still better to be in those jobs than anything requiring intelligence now.
As a result coding could easily be automated entirely and we may only see for example 20% increase in total "large" software velocity. As I mentioned in another comment it will be the people in the chain who produce little value but are required for other reasons (e.g. compliance, due diligence, sales, consultants, etc) that will remain and will be the bottleneck. The people that techies thought offered little value and made up inefficiencies and didn't contribute at all -> they have the last laugh in the end and they have AI to thank for that.
Personally in my team I know we are seeing significant improvement to the point where hiring is no longer considered; I'm worried about our senior staff even. Anything that is labor, and not deciding "what to do" I feel I no longer need help with nearly as much. This is many components in a large public org. Feel like I only need two staff now, and that's more to understand the problem and what to do then the action of actually doing it; and a backup for accountability. If I hire more its only because we I can't keep up with the AI and am burning out, and I won't because I don't want to "hire to fire" later on if we run out of product work. It makes me anxious, and I can't recommend anyone with honesty to make this their career anymore; anything else feels more like false hope at this point.
I see none of that happening - software quality is actually in freefall (but AI is not to blame here, this began even before the LLM era), delivery doesn't seem to be any faster (not a surprise - writing code has basically never been the bottleneck and the push to shove AI everywhere probably slows down delivery across the board) nor cheaper (all the money spent on misguided AI initiatives actually costs more).
It is a super easy bet to take with money - software development is still a big industry and if you legitimately believe AI will do 90% of a senior engineer you can start a consultancy, undercut everyone else and pocket the difference. I haven’t heard of any long-term success stories with this approach so far.