If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well.

Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice.

Code is NEVER cheap. Just because, at current completely unrealistic AI pricing, using agents is cheaper than hiring juniors, does not make code cheap. It makes producing code cheap, which has always been low-cost. Every line of code is a cost, is a maintenance burden, is complexity. An AI, even with somehow infinite context window, will cost more money the more code you have.

Could you replace a whole team of engineers with AI? Probably, yeah. Could you simply fire everyone at your company and close it down, without much of a problem? Also probably yes, for most companies.

AIs can help with debugging, can help with writing code, with drafting designs, they can help with almost every step. The second you let OpenAI, or Anthropic, take full code ownership over your products, and you fire the last engineer, is the time when the AI pricing can go up to match what engineers make today. You've just reinvented the highly paid consultant.

Or you could take the middle-ground and hire good engineers, make sure they maintain an understanding of the codebase, and let them use whatever tools they use to get the job done, and done well. This is the way that I've seen competent companies handle it.