A 2026 AI Engineer is a 1996 Software Architect. I don't need to be the one manually implementing the individual widgets of a system, I can delegate their implementation to developers (agents).

I'm being a little facetious, but I don't think it's far off the mark from what TFA is saying, and it matches my experience over the past few months. The worst architects we ever worked with were the ones who couldn't actually implement anything from scratch. Like TFA says, if you've got the fundamentals down and you want to see how far you can go with these new tools, play the role of architect for a change and let the agents fly.