Students and junior developers ask me a version of the same question over and over. Are you afraid AI is going to kill software engineering?
Code is incidental
The act of putting hands to keyboard and writing code is not what software engineering is. There is nothing intrinsically special about it. Writing code is only art in so far as anything could be considered art. If you really want to be artist, let me introduce you to the valuable art of risk management.
You are paid to manage risk
Your value in this field, as an individual contributor or as an engineering manager, has always come from the risk you manage. A software engineer manages risk at a technical level that no other role in a company can reach. The product manager can't do it, the designer can't, and the executive signing off on the launch certainly can't. You sit at the one seat where a technical decision turns directly into money, and it moves in both directions. Your decisions bring in revenue. They also stop expensive mistakes before they ever reach a customer. Evaluating tradeoffs, mitigating architectural risk, and most importantly, making technical decisions. These are the facisinating and powerful works of art that only we can do. This is what makes us special.
Accountability has no shortcut
Hand a capable non technical person a good AI tool and they can produce working code. They can wire up a deployment and get a system running, at least for a while. They cannot be responsibly accountable to the business for that software once real people depend on it. Companies that think they can work around this reality are lying to themselves, and quietly absorbing risk they do not realize exists.
Human problems are prime factors
No, AI will not kill software engineering. Like many things that people try to solve with software, when all of the technical sub-problems have been factored out, you are still left with a human one. Trust and accountability are the foundation of business.