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
Producing code is the visible output of the job. It has never been the job itself. Engineers have to decide what to build and take responsibility for what they release. AI got very good at the typing. It left the rest untouched.
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 calls bring in revenue. They also stop expensive mistakes before they ever reach a customer. Preventing those mistakes rarely makes it onto a roadmap, and it is most of the reason the role exists.
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. Accountability means being able to say you understand how the software works and you are willing to stand behind it. AI can generate the code, but it cannot give you that technical judgment. Plenty of companies tell themselves they can route around this. They are quietly absorbing the risk and betting it never surfaces.
Human problems are prime factors
Take any messy problem, break it into technical sub-problems, hand the mechanical work to a machine, and you are left holding the piece a machine can't carry. Someone has to be trusted. Someone has to answer for the result. Trust and accountability sit under every business that sells software.
No, AI is not going to kill software engineering. It is going to make the engineers who can stand behind their work harder to replace than they already were.