I think people are getting funneled into a new career path of being a technologist or technology director. People who can ask the right questions at the right time and direct attention to the appropriate areas given the goals and feedback.

People don't appreciate how much of engineering is just as you've described.

When they imagine someone using AI (except for themself), they imagine the least curious, least inquisitive vibe-coder. And they invent the idea that the only way to be someone who asks questions or remains curious is to have paid the dues that they see themself as having paid. Therefore the world must always need them.

Well, all you have to do now is imagine the vibe-coder who has the same curiosity and inquisitiveness that you had especially when you were starting out and weren't yet a professional programmer. The only difference is that now you don't have to bootstrap a whole software career to understand how things work; you can skip that and merely ask.

This has always been the most valuable part of the job if you ask me. Its just that the other parts of the job were quite hard to get right letting people build a career out of that specialization.