AI allows you to move faster, but it also demands that you pay more attention in proportion to how fast you want to move. This requires more focus, i.e. more time developing. Effectively the structure at companies should swing back to how it used to be a few decades ago (I think, maybe I'm wrong and it's always been like this), where engineers mostly focused on delivering code. The difference now is that they can be expected to deliver much more code at higher quality.
To summarize, using a little AI doesn't pay off, you need to be doing that all day, and that is not how engineers spend their time in most of the industry anymore.
I would also strongly push back on the assertions that being very technical means spending most of your time on the code, and that you have to be using AI all day for it to be useful. Let’s say I’m a technical lead or a manager reviewing a design doc for a large project. I have an idea based on my years of technical involvement for how to significantly improve the quality or delivery timeline for the project. I used to have to ask the doc author to look into this approach, not knowing for sure if it would directly translate. Now I can take my crazy idea, quickly dispatch a coding agent to try it out against the codebase, go to a meeting, and then check on what it came up with to give a much more informed and technically accurate suggestion on the doc. I still have to have the technical expertise to iterate a bit with the agent and not over or under state the possible impact of my idea. But this lets me take say an hour rather than a week to come up with a vetted recommendation that saves months on the schedule.
Implementing the first text edit field in your program is kind of interesting when all you have is asm and 4k of RAM. Nobody wants to bother doing it manually when you have a web browser that can eat gigs of RAM.
The idea is more or less benefiting from doing work in bulk which AI is now allowing. I even think multiple engineers (human redundancy to double check the same code) should team up with one AI system and form a small team that handles millions of lines of code, with the only job to feed incoming tickets and check the AI work. Anyone not reviewing code should be facilitating everything else with their own AIs. I think large companies can collapse entire engineering departments into a few people. The cost would be that everyone else has to think like an engineer to sort out requirements and provide direction, but as you point out, this is now easier with the help of AI.
Maybe this is why you’re seeing more effort shifted away from technical work. Maybe I’m a nihilist. Maybe both?
> unless AI is directed at finding the right problems to solve
This direction can be done by non-engineers with AI to consult (replacing that part of human engineer's role).
In large companies there is also the politics game. The more freed time senior engineering manager and senior product managers get, the more politics intensives and waste more of their time.
I use the term “product management” in its traditional sense of establishing scope, feature prioritization, user experience, shape of integrations, etc.