Given AI (today) has no direct agency and can’t create anything unless directly prompted, and engineering is largely domain discovery and resolving of unforeseen edges in a domain, I don’t think we are going to see a time where generative AI alone is able to be more than an assistant. It’ll likely improve, but given it only can react to what it is given/told/fed and inherently can’t innovate or create or discover, despite the illusion that it might be from the position of the users ignorance of details the AI can produce, it’ll be an increasingly powerful adjunct to increasingly capable engineers. The problems we solve will be more interesting, we will produce better software faster, but I’ve never seen the world as lacking in problems to solve but rather capacity to solve them well or quickly enough given the iterative time it takes to develop software. I think this current trend of generative AI will help improve that situation, but will likely make software engineers even more in demand as the possible uses of software become more ubiquitous as the per unit cost of development goes down.