There is a strange contradiction happening in software engineering right now. A lot of developers are worried that AI is going to make them obsolete.
At the same time, the people building the most capable AI coding tools are demonstrating something that should probably make us rethink what being a software engineer actually means. I don't think the future is one where nobody understands software anymore. I think it is one where writing the software becomes dramatically cheaper.
And if that happens, the thing that makes an engineer valuable has to move. That is what I mean by career safety. Career safety isn't about making yourself impossible to replace. It is about making your value portable.
We've always resisted giving up the code
Developers have a long history of being suspicious of abstractions that take work away from us. We went from machine code to assembly, from assembly to higher-level languages, from manually managing memory to garbage collection, from building everything ourselves to libraries and frameworks, and from text editors to IDEs.
