> With AI, everyone now gets to act like a PE.
I've heard this before many times, and it's simply not true. The resemblance is there, but there's also a fundamental difference. The difference is in whose name is on the commit, who embraces responsibility for things going wrong. PE will, at most, share responsibility with the person who actually authored the code, AI user is always responsible for whatever code their agent wrote.
As a PE you may skip reading all the code written by your underlings because your underlings have signed a contract with your employer and will be legally responsible for certain things, have they decided to do those.
In the case of actual PE, there's an actual programmer who, at least, believes he or she understands the code they wrote. In the case of AI, there maybe nobody.
Here's an interesting aspect though. There are companies (I'd know, since I worked for one), who sell a product where there's a part of code no engineer working for that company understands. In my case, that piece of code was a formula obtained from some former partner (a bank) to calculate something related to credit check. Nobody could explain why the formula was the way it was, but it was extensively used in testing to validate that our code produced the intended result when it came to this part of credit check. There's a folk tale about DB2 containing a binary blob whose source was likely written in Assembly and was since lost to time, which is essentially a magic component nobody really knows the internal workings of. I'm sure there are more pieces like that around in older companies.
Since I expect the regulators will soon start tightening the nuts on programming in general, especially since AI is asking for such an action, what will happen to these "magic" programs? If I were a regulator, I would have the company, under a threat of criminal punishment in some cases, to vow that they understand the code that went into making of their product and are therefore responsible for what it does. This is not the case today and only in a very few cases were software companies found guilty of criminal negligence... but I think that the writing is on the wall: with AI being used the way it is, the legislation requiring understanding is just around the corner.