The framing of "will AI replace engineers" misses where the real displacement is already happening.
We're watching AI eat the repetitive, low-judgment work first — across every knowledge worker category, not just code. Data entry, scheduling, formatting, basic research, first-draft writing. That work is going.
What survives is the work that requires context and judgment: understanding what a client actually needs (not what they said they want), deciding which problem to solve first, noticing when something feels off even if it looks right on paper.
For software engineers specifically: if your value is "I know the syntax," AI wins. If your value is "I understand what this system needs to do and why," you have a long runway.
Same pattern plays out in ops and business generally. The role doesn't disappear — it just stops requiring you to do the low-judgment parts manually.