Having worked in places across both extremes (software engineer doing lots of other things including BD, hardware, ops, etc. to just being a JIRA ticket machine monkey), I am suspicious that HN readership is biased towards the former and frankly the bulk of "software engineers" in the world _willingly_ exist in the latter category. I didn't experience the latter until later in my career and God Almighty was it uncomfortable, but I think if AI were to displace some subset of "software engineers" it would those (they also seem to overwhelmingly dislike writing any prose whatsoever, which to me is a major tell). Many, many software engineers outside of hotshot shops seem either incapable or profoundly averse to "asking the questions" as you say.

Most here on HN know sweatshops exists but seemed they think not people work there or use them. I have worked with (via clients who used them) programmers in enormous buildings in Bangalore, who have a camera behind them so you can watch your people 247 and who just mindlessly transform jira tickets into code; I keep saying; there is zero use for all those millions of people at all; seems HN does not believe that because they seem to not believe these people exist. I worked with many over the past 30 years and by far most have no real clue what they are doing so I also doubt they can be re educated for a new co existence with LLMs.