Comment by YZF
8 hours ago
One thing worth mentioning is that even before AI only some small subset of engineers have experienced building systems from scratch or inventing new ways of doing things or root causing complex problems or even writing a lot of code. Most software engineering is maintenance or mundane or not productive.
Even in a world where there's a lot of AI generated code there can still be people that have enough exposure to doing hard things. Definitely at this point in time where AI can't really do all those hard things anyways - but even after it'll be able to.
you don't need to build systems from scratch to acquire problem-solving skills. even routine maintenance problems require to dig into documentation, look at github issues, and do root-cause analysis. These skills are eliminated from reliance on AI and there is no fallback if one never acquired them in the first place.