I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job.
I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else.
I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers.
I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.
Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.
> But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else
I talked about this a few days ago with coworkers and I phrased it almost exactly this way. I want to be an IC. I want to do the work. Becoming a manager-of-one to funnel all my work through would deprive me of genuinely my greatest joy in life.
I'm envious you managed a few good decades. I'm almost eight years into what has been my dream profession and to see indications it's going to morph from writing code into telling a robot to write code is just so demoralizing. I could have done this for decades. I wanted to do this for decades.