Many engineers with a long career have probably thought about becoming a manager at one point. A large portion of them decided to stay in the IC (individual contributor) track because they did not like some of the aspects of being a manager. Some decided to stick to the IC role because they liked creating code.

With AI, every engineer will need to become a manager to manager one or more AI assistants who do a lot of the work. The good news is that this will not involve dealing with performance reviews, psychological problems, and raises. You will also remain close to the code.

Look at the manager role again, and see which parts of it will be needed to manage AI agents. Learn those parts from standard management books. You will kind of pivot, but still remain close to the code.

On the other hand, if all you enjoyed is typing in code, but hated working with product people to understand the intent, doing code reviews, or building software that is easy to QA, there will be fewer and fewer such jobs.

I'm finding that people skills are more important than managing AI currently. Both people and agents will build 10 versions of the same product if you let them.

Communication is key, and it always has been.

I'm moving more to management after 13 years of IC work and being lead for the last year. We are all in on AI for everything at my company, and that's not just lip service.