I'd argue the kinds of things that LLMs spit out these days don't actually require "software engineering" and haven't for a while.

If you can slop it out with a coding agent it's probably not the kind of thing that needed an engineer in the first place, just someone who can write the code. Which is not the same thing.

You certainly can do software engineering with LLMs (and in some cases it supercharges it). But then you're doing actual software engineering anyway, with or without the LLM.

The only thing that's changed is being able to call yourself a software engineer when you weren't any such thing in the first place. I agree it's harder to do that now.