> I think we're mving towards humans no longer needing to understand a codebase, and letting AI drive it.

Hard disagree. Even the best frontier models generate output that's not what I asked for. Sometimes I realize that I get lazy in my prompting and the lack of specificity winds up showing up in the output. Just the other day, a coworker built a huge feature using frontier models and it slipped an IDOR in.

I just don't see a world in which we completely cede control of the codebase to AI because it's still my ass on the line if I ship something that completely borks production. If I'm not reading code regularly, then I lose the ability to read code, and if I lose that ability, then I'm no longer a developer.

I can't help but feel that this reads more as a reflection that you don't want to stop being a developer than it does that thing's aren't moving in the direction that the GP said it is.