Things have changed so much from when I started programming. I didn't start until I was at upper school (at 13) and that was as a lunchtime 'club' thing dialling in from a single terminal to the local college. I didn't have my own computer for a while after that. I've managed to have a career around it anyway. I will probably retire in a few years and I wonder what changes will come by then.
I do think it is useful to have a little knowledge of how to program computers. There's lots of jobs where you can automate some of the work. I've done a fair bit of coding for fun, including around Hive stuff. We can access all this data to analyse the data.
I've not used 'AI' tools to actually write code for me, but I know others do. You have to understand what it is doing as it may get it wrong. Debugging is the really tricky part.
That's an interesting potted history of how you got into it! Back in the day, I never had the option at school - books for spectrum to programme games.
AI I think is going to be essential - probably great at spotting those typos!