On effective engineering teams, there's always at least one person who is fluent one layer below where the rest of the team operates. That person tends to be extraordinarily useful in tricky situations. Examples: someone who can read assembly on a team writing C; someone who spends a lot of time in the browser debugger on a frontend team; or someone who is comfortable stepping deep into third-party library code with a debugger.

If any of these examples are familiar, you might chuckle that of course everyone on the team has these skills. But there's a big difference between someone who can barely parse the symbols, and someone who can actually interpret them and extract meaning.

Five to ten years from now, I have no idea whether software engineers still be coding. But I'm sure there will still be code. Do you want to be the person on your team who is fluent in it, or one of the rest who rely on that person?

Well put. The step to AI is a little like the step to using an IDE. It simplifies and automate a various bottlenecks. But when the IDE starts randomly failing, you need to call on that guy that knows how to work without the IDE.