Redefining Engineering Roles in the AI Era

There is a version of the AI-in-engineering conversation that goes like this: LLMs write the code now, so junior engineers are redundant, senior engineers become prompt engineers, and the whole talent pyramid inverts overnight. This version is wrong, but it is wrong in ways that are worth unpacking rather than just dismissing, because the underlying question it is gesturing at is real and important. How do engineering roles actually change when AI tools handle a meaningful and growing share of implementation work? What does a junior engineer do when the boilerplate they used to write is now generated in seconds? What does a senior engineer do when the implementation work that used to demonstrate their value is increasingly automated? What does a team look like when the relationship between headcount and output has fundamentally shifted? These are not hypothetical questions. They are questions that engineering leaders and individual engineers are navigating right now, often without a cl