...For now.

Frontier models are generating sensible abstract engineering decisions for nontrivial code bases. Phase 1 (GPT 4 era) was "fancy autocomplete": it could generate a function or complete a clause before losing the plot. Phase 2 (Opus 4.x era) was the spec-driven development era, involving careful construction of guardrails and guidelines and steering the agents as they worked. Phase 3 is the beginning of the "software factory" era. You can now one-shot nontrivial apps with a prompt that leaves most of the specifics up to the agents. You just can't do this for like, a whole enterprise—maybe a microservice.

Another phase or two, and you can pretty much say goodbye to 95% of SWE jobs. The only people left involved in the software development process will be business analysts, product managers, and perhaps designers if they don't want the UI to look all "AI ass-ugly". A handful of trillion-dollar companies will retain a few really smart people who could code by hand if they wanted to, to keep the models trained and topped up on good practices. But line-of-business, which was the bread and butter for software engineers for going on 70 years now, will be done by machine. Humans will specify, and humans will QA the results, and that's it.