"Will AI take our jobs?" a client asked recently. The honest answer: it already took part of mine. I don't miss it.
The floor rises
The boilerplate, the glue code, the first draft of a test suite — increasingly, that's the machine's work now. What's left is the part that was always the actual job: deciding what to build, and why.
From typist to editor
Autonomous systems don't remove the engineer. They change the altitude. Less typing, more judgment. Less "how do I write this loop" and more "should this loop exist at all."
The engineers who thrive won't be the fastest typists. They'll be the clearest thinkers.
We build autonomous software for exactly this reason — not to take people out of the loop, but to move them up it.
The question was never whether the machine can write the code. It's whether you know which code is worth writing.