Engineering boils down to figuring out what is important and prioritizing.

This requires having an understanding of a business domain, economics, human psychology and technology.

The competitive aspect of it means that you need to understand these things better than most people and machines. If you don't, then your skills have no value on the market. Will generalist AI trained on public data ever understand these things better than software engineers across every possible niche?

I don't think so because that knowledge is usually gate-kept. Nowadays, new engineers almost have to beg to be given access to knowledge of company systems. It takes at least 6 month for a skilled engineer to ramp up on large systems... And it's mostly because of institutional resistance.

The thing is, it doesn't even require people to be withholding information... Some engineers will happily share everything they know about internal systems... But in a big company; you first have to identify this person. That can take a while... Then you need to identify other persons who will give you other information that is relevant to your specific tasks/integrations. Then there are all sorts of other constraints and restrictions to deal with.

You can't just deploy an AI to a big company and it will magically guess all the endpoints which exist... You have to tell it what is available and enterprise systems are not designed for transparency.

Big companies resorted to a kind of security-through-obscurity. This used to be considered bad practice 10 years ago but at some point they just gave up, let complexity run amok and started calling it "multiple layers of defence" but now this obscurity is a problem for evaluating system security (too much unknown context is required, nobody fully understands the entire system) and it slows down development and maintenance as well.

Whoever knows the most context about a system has the advantage... And this isn't necessarily a company insider. Most likely, the people with the most context are platform providers.

I predict that most major hacks will originate from platform providers. We already started seeing this with Axios hack (originating from GitHub/npm) and Vercel (originating from Google Workspace).

The centralization risk is massive because each platform is servicing so many large companies. It only works when there is perfect incentive alignment but that's not usually the reality during difficult economic times. Third-party platforms cannot be trusted anymore.