So far in engineering, as tooling makes us more productive we're just tasked with building more and more complex widgets.
Taking web development as the example - compilers, bundles, linters, git, hosting services, even new languages all made us more productive. Companies could have fired half the engineers and kept building high quality, mostly static sites for their content marketing. Instead we took all the productivity gains and started building every website with the complexity of Facebook.
The risk won't be when we're able to use code assistants, the risk is when an AI can produce deployable code and infrastructure directly. As long as any dev is needed in the middle most businesses won't realize they could cut some engineers because most businesses honestly have no idea what is done on the engineering side.
Taking web development as the example - compilers, bundles, linters, git, hosting services, even new languages all made us more productive. Companies could have fired half the engineers and kept building high quality, mostly static sites for their content marketing. Instead we took all the productivity gains and started building every website with the complexity of Facebook.
The risk won't be when we're able to use code assistants, the risk is when an AI can produce deployable code and infrastructure directly. As long as any dev is needed in the middle most businesses won't realize they could cut some engineers because most businesses honestly have no idea what is done on the engineering side.