Wouldn't that be the best thing possible for our industry? Watching the bandwagoners and "vibe coders" get destroyed and come begging for actual thinking talent would be delicious. I think the bets are equal on whether later LLMs can unfuck current LLM code to the degree that no one needs to be re-hired... but my bet is on your side, that bad code collapses under its own weight. As does bad management in thrall to trends whose repercussions they don't understand. The scenario you're describing is almost too good. It would be a renaissance for the kind of thinking coders you're talking about - those of us who spend 90% of our time considering how to fit a solution to a domain and a specific problem - and it would scare the hell out of the next crop of corner suite assholes, essentially enshrining the belief that only smart humans can write code that performs on the threat/performance model needed to deal with any given problem.

>> the vast majority of an engineer's time isn't spent writing -- it's spent reading and thinking.

Unfortunately, this is now an extremely minority understanding of how we need to do our job - both among hirees and the people who hire them. You're lucky if you can find an employer who understands the value of it. But this is what makes a "10x coder". The unpaid time spent lying awake in bed, sleepless until you can untangle the real logic problems you'll have to turn into code the next day.

That's not how real life works; you are thinking of a movie. Management will never let down of any power they accumulated until the place is completely ransacked. The Soviet Union is a cautionary tale, a relatively modern event and well documented.