The move now is toward "software factories" where sucky design is no one's responsibility.
Eventually the whole thing will grind to a halt or fail catastrophically (that's life), but it will seem very good while it's working.
I don't know if there's a real role for engineers beyond designing and tuning the factory itself.
Of course, such a thing is only tractable on highly factorable platforms. Well designed incumbents have an edge for the next couple of years or so, until others catch up.
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I think it will all be automated in the end. Engineers will be more like rare consultants who inspect and validate very high level solutions.
Clearly there is still some work to do, but the work I do now is very different, and for me, much less enjoyable.
I'm not solving challenging logic or algorithmic problems anymore, but basically just iterating on features with agents or getting them to look into things for me.
It sucks because I used to be very good at these things, but my edge against less competent SWEs doesn't really exist anymore.
More annoyingly, people I work with are producing a lot of code that I think the design of kinda sucks, but agents can force the design to work and so it works. I suggest we do things another way, but I'm now just slowing things down and it's hard to argue against the comment, "if that becomes a problem we can just get Claude to refactor later".
I guess what I'm saying is that I think think there's a really crappy job that will still exist for a while around managing and contributing to these agent-generated codebases. But skill is less about your technical abilities, but how good you are at hooking up agents to things and getting them to solve problems. This doesn't interest me at all though. My desire to spend a lot of time design and thinking about problems, and deeply understanding the codebase I'm maintaining now just work against me.
I think there will be SWEs by some definition, but the job as it existed a few years ago is gone. Not even saying that's a bad thing, but for someone like myself, it may as well be dead.