[inder1]

The "AI kills software jobs" framing and the "AI is just a tool" framing are both wrong in the same way — they treat it as uniform.

What actually seems to be happening is that AI compresses the value of generic output and amplifies the value of domain judgment. A developer who knows how a specific industry works, what the edge cases are, why the legacy system was built the way it was — that context isn't in the training data. It compounds.

The engineers I've seen struggle most aren't the ones in AI-exposed roles. They're the ones in AI-exposed roles who've optimized for output volume rather than judgment depth. Those two things used to correlate. They no longer do.