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.
If you ever followed down the rabbit hole of children content on YouTube, the one that infants and toddlers end up after an hour of autoplay with some innocent cartoon at the beginning, you'd find among the piles of morbid psychotic trash a variety of videos of children watching someone else playing some games, a whole class of videos in itself.
I can't explain this with anything else but a coordinated effort to flash the norm of watching someone/something doing something as opposed to being engaged in immediate action yourself into the firmware of future people. This lines up with many other current trends pretty well. Talk about incrementing Baudrillard's level of simulation a notch up.