I think a lot of these devs are too proud. Personally, I'm glad to have AI coding now. After 15 years of professional experience, it was becoming repetitive.

Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.

Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.

My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.

For now.

I do understand the feeling, though I genuinely can't help but feel jealous! I've spent most of my teenage years learning everything I could about software, with a particular focus on low-level systems programming, small finicky cache line optimizations, SIMD, DOD, and the year I enter the workforce ChatGPT comes out and suddenly all that stuff is "solved".

I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.

How many software architect roles are there in a typical company? How many are needed per product?