The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools.
Two things you can do regarding programming here.
1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.
2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.
I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.
1. is a bit contradictory or at the least a "devils in the details" wishful fantasy which hasn't been showcased convincingly in the wild yet (by "the wild", I mean software eng shops and corps). It's assumed the devs who have taste were able to implement their taste fine pre-AI, sure, but the whole gotcha in 1. is that the ones with good taste currently are not confident in implementing their good taste while simultaneously "producing good results quickly using AI".
I disagree. There is a lot of boilerplate to write and mundane things to check, which AI can speed up a lot. I'm not talking about 'software engineering' here, but about 'programming', which consists of a lot of write DTO->write rest interface->write interface->write simple select query->map response. The good taste here comes from the architectural design and the UI design.
The amount of 'software engineers' who couldn't design a table to be readable or a flow to be intuitive is off the charts. AI neither helps nor harms here, it just makes implementing good and bad decisions faster.
Two things you can do regarding programming here.
1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.
2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.
I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.