> Why would you pay a high salary for a SWE when your business teams can just generate whatever app they need without having to know anything about how it actually works?

It depends on how good the AI is. The advantage of an SWE is that they have a systems thinking mindset, so they can solve some problems more efficiently. With some apps in won't matter, but with others will.

One potential positive outcome is that we will be able to solve more and bigger problems, since our capacity for solving problems has been augmented with AI.