[sankaritan]

This can surely feel painful, and I feel occasional sense of dread too, but then realize than not a lot have changed for folks working in medium+ size companies. Domain knowledge and tech expertise were never the sole differentiators for me when it comes to working with or even hiring capable software engineers. There's so much more to software engineer's job and ability to produce code / designs was barely 30% of our jobs. There is this interdisciplinary skillset we had to hone, how to work with others, how to understand what they actually want, how to ship things safely and learn from our mistakes and data to understand what to build next. You said you maintain candid relationship with PMs and stakeholders so you're likely underselling the whole scope of work you do day to day beyond immediate technical delivery.

The time ahead may be rough given the transition period we're in but Software Engineering role (or whatever we will call it in 1-2 years) should not go away.

LLMs surely will be able to do most of the individual work Software Engineer needs to do, but blending them all together is a lot harder task. And once we have AI doing that too, well, I believe at that point vast majority of knowledge work can be replaced by AI too and this is not a Software Engineering problem anymore.