Over cocktails recently, a few colleagues and I kept circling the same idea: AI is making everyone a builder. You still get leverage from software engineering skill, but you no longer need a formal engineering background to prototype, automate, and ship something useful.
We agreed that automating ourselves out of work is generally a good thing. If repetitive tasks can be delegated to tools, we should delegate them and move our effort toward harder problems, better judgment, and more original thinking.
That changes the center of gravity of work from execution to direction, from "how do I write this function?" to "what should we build, and why?" It can feel uncomfortable, but it is also progressive: building is less gatekept, capability is more widely distributed, and human taste, curiosity, and clarity matter even more.