It's entirely possible that this will turn us all into much less of a special highly-compensated profession, and that would suck.
Although when you say "AI is devaluing our unique skillsets," I think it's important to recognize that even without AI, it's not our skillsets that ever held value.
Code is just a means to translate business logic into an automated process. If we had the same skillset but it couldn't make the business logic do the business, it has no value.
Maybe this is a pedantic distinction, but it's essentially saying that the "engineer" part of "software engineer" is the important bit - the fact that we are just using tools in our toolbox to get whatever "thing" needs to get done.
At least for now, it seems like actually possessing a skillset is helpful and/or critical to using these tools. They can't handle large context, and even if that changes, it still seems to be extremely helpful to be able to articulate on a detailed level what you want the AI to develop for you.
An analogy to that is that if you just put your customer in front of a development team and tell them how to make the application, versus putting a staff engineer or experienced product manager in front of them. The AI might be able to complete the project in both cases, but with that experienced person it's going to avoid a lot of pitfalls and work faster/better.
This analogy reminds me of a real-life instance where I built something that someone higher than director level basically spelled out exactly, essentially dictating the architecture to me that I was to follow. They don't really see my code, they might even hate my code, I am like an AI to them. And indeed, by dictating to me a very good architecture, I was able to basically follow that blindly and ran into very few problems.
Although when you say "AI is devaluing our unique skillsets," I think it's important to recognize that even without AI, it's not our skillsets that ever held value.
Code is just a means to translate business logic into an automated process. If we had the same skillset but it couldn't make the business logic do the business, it has no value.
Maybe this is a pedantic distinction, but it's essentially saying that the "engineer" part of "software engineer" is the important bit - the fact that we are just using tools in our toolbox to get whatever "thing" needs to get done.
At least for now, it seems like actually possessing a skillset is helpful and/or critical to using these tools. They can't handle large context, and even if that changes, it still seems to be extremely helpful to be able to articulate on a detailed level what you want the AI to develop for you.
An analogy to that is that if you just put your customer in front of a development team and tell them how to make the application, versus putting a staff engineer or experienced product manager in front of them. The AI might be able to complete the project in both cases, but with that experienced person it's going to avoid a lot of pitfalls and work faster/better.
This analogy reminds me of a real-life instance where I built something that someone higher than director level basically spelled out exactly, essentially dictating the architecture to me that I was to follow. They don't really see my code, they might even hate my code, I am like an AI to them. And indeed, by dictating to me a very good architecture, I was able to basically follow that blindly and ran into very few problems.