Since at least half a year now, I'm often times asking myself where we're moving towards regarding software engineering. Regarding my spare time projects I'm nowadays using Cursor/Claude Code to work on my vision (a database system since 2013 as a continuation of a project at the University of Konstanz) to do big refactorings I always wanted to do, but never found the drive to start as it would have been a major multi-year effort. Now, in the age of AI agents it's really impressive, as of course there are often times very repetitive patterns, but also regarding other issues I never had the time (and skills?) to solve myself. Of course, sometimes the tests make no sense, it's going haywire sometimes (for instance rather deleting tests or "simplify" them, instead of fixing real production code issues...). But on the other hand I built a full frontend with the help of AI agents (and I'm a backend engineer, always have been with a little embedded software engineering expertise).
That said, whenever I find some time, I can work on my vision much more efficiently (mostly as a product owner + architect in one person rather than writing everything "by hand"). So, I of course wonder if our jobs are safe in the future. I think you'll always have to heavily guide the agents and stop them immediately whenever they're about to get haywire and thus you have to have the skills of a senior software engineer, but on the other hand I'm sure that small teams of senior engineers can be much more efficient than before. So, either it's that you'll need less software engineers at some point, or if it's rather that you can deliver products faster with more ideas implemented or simply that new ideas can be explored much more efficiently as before => more small startups?). I really don't know...
