> Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write".

True, but there's usually at least one person who knows that particular part of the system that you need to touch, and if there isn't, you'll spend a lot of time fixing that bug and become that person.

The bet you're describing is that the AI will be the expert, and if it can be that, why couldn't it also be the expert at understanding the users' needs so that no one is needed anywhere in the loop?

What I don't understand about a vision where AI is able to replace humans at some (complicated) part of the entire industrial stack is why does it stop at a particular point? What makes us think that it can replace programmers and architects - jobs that require a rather sophisticated combination of inductive and deductive reasoning - but not the PMs, managers, and even the users?

Steve Yegge recently wrote about an exponential growth in AI capabilities. But every exponential growth has to plateau at some point, and the problem with exponential growth is that if your prediction about when that plateau happens is off by a little, the value at that point could be different from your prediction by a lot (in either direction). That means that it's very hard to predict where we'll "end up" (i.e. where the plateau will be). The prediction that AI will be able to automate nearly all of the technical aspects of programming yet little beyond them seems as unlikely to me as any arbitrary point. It's at least as likely that we'll end up well below or well above that point.