I would imagine a pretty good chunk of the work is close to being automated. I imagine (perhaps in ignorance, I am not a web or systems dev) that computers are

I would imagine a pretty good chunk of the work is close to being automated. I imagine (perhaps in ignorance, I am not a web or systems dev) that computers are close to being able to engineer stuff like site reliability (at least for small to medium scale businesses) without human input. problems with well defined "good" or even optimal solutions are low hanging fruit for machines. that said, we're a long way away from feeding a copy of the latest c++ standard into a machine and getting a working compiler out of the other end. no matter how well written, it is still quite a feat to turn a human-language specification into executable code. even harder is to turn a loosely defined set of requirements (often gathered from people who don't really know what they want in the first place) into a solid spec in the first place. perhaps this is the hubris you are speaking of, but I think most developers who are more than brainless code monkeys are quite a ways away from losing their jobs.