Agreed. I haven't written a line of code since last November when AI had the big shift into something good.

The average HNer would imagine me scrolling TikTok while I periodically swivel to Claude to type "continue" while my brain shrivels away.

That I can delegate lower level work like implementation means I spend my time at increasingly high leverage positions like deciding what gets built. And any time I want, I can get as granular and inquisitive as I'd like about the lower level work. After all, I probably chose it from a multiple choice AskUserQuestion tool call, each with a blurb and shortlist of trade-offs.

All this talk of de-skilling doesn't make a lot of sense to me because what are these skills people covet so much that defined most of the day to day of a software developer? What, the implementation details of some framework or the intimate details of your company's crappy legacy software stack?

Dunno, I have bigger plans for myself than that.

That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.