The framing of "high-upside, high-volatility" nails it. Tech didn't become less valuable — it became less predictable.
What I'd add: the layoffs aren't random noise. There's a pattern. Companies over-hired during the zero-interest-rate era, and AI is now compressing the time between "this role exists" and "this role is automated." The jobs disappearing fastest are the ones that were already abstraction layers — roles where you coordinated between systems rather than solving novel problems.
The real shift in 2026 isn't skill vs. adaptability vs. luck. It's whether you're building on top of AI or competing against it. If your daily work can be described as a prompt, you're in the danger zone. If your work involves judgment calls that require context AI doesn't have (customer relationships, architectural trade-offs across systems, domain expertise), you're actually more valuable now than before.
From my experience building AI tools: the developers I see thriving aren't necessarily the most technically skilled. They're the ones who understand a business domain deeply enough to know which problems are worth solving with AI and which aren't. That combination of technical capability + domain judgment is the real moat in 2026.