Coding expertise was on a downward trend way before AI arrived. Does nobody remember how most "engineers" were literally copying and pasting snippets from StackOverflow they didn't understand, and the snippets usually had tons of bugs? How many of you know Assembly well? How many of you can decompile a program, or write your own compiler or VM? How many of you could pass a computer science course (that you didn't take at Uni)?

We've been hearing about the demise of skills since before the invention of the loom. The only skills we've truly lost are for things nobody uses or makes anymore. What actually happens is, we develop a new tool that's better than the old tool, and we get good at using the new tool. We then have a class of people whose job it is to maintain the new tools. We don't need that many of them because the whole point is to eliminate that labor.

Your jobs as software engineers are going away, it's that simple. Your new job is to use the AI tools to make products. Somebody else's job will be to make the AI a better software engineer.