I don't think they will get more rare; there will always be a top % of engineers that do deep dives. I hope anyway.

But AI won't replace them, nor did the past 50+ years of software development innovation. There's millions (tens of millions?) of higher programming language developers that don't know the difference between stack or heap besides maybe some theory they half remember from school but they don't care because they don't have to think about it for their day job.

i think the shift will be from craftmens to trademens in regards to general software engineers, but these are type of writes up stem of a artisan style all to its own.