[krackers]

Traditionally those roles of providing "alignment" to overcome organizational inertia were held by program managers. So that seems like IC roles are indeed going away, to be replaced by more "technical program manager" type roles.

[ppeetteerr]

Maybe it's my experience, but TPMs were often responsible for coordinating large org-wide or cross-org initiatives. It's prohibitively expensive to have TPMs on anything smaller.

Since engineering with AI is still very technical, I would wager that software engineers would stretch into less technical areas of software development rather than TPMs stretching into technical areas. I only say this as someone with experience with AI and I see how easy it is to write bad code with AI if you're not aware of what it's doing.