When 'software engineer' becomes a minimum-wage job.
We've all heard the premise (or is it a promise) that the use of AI will allow software engineers to do more and faster programming. Then of course they'll have lots of free time because they got their job done so quickly. Hurrah for the three-day work week!
Of course if you can do six jobs in the time of two what you end up doing is eighteen jobs in the time of six. Hurrah for the eight-day work week! Wait a minute ...
Then the Upper Management starts asking "Why are we paying these people all this money when the AI agent is doing the actual work?" Somebody realises that "any idiot" can now do A-level programming work, because they simply ask the computer to do it for them. Since companies long ago gave up on producing quality products it doesn't matter that the auto-generated code is garbage; you can release a dozen updates a day to 'resolve' the issues - and if it creates more issues, so what? Simply release more updates!
At this point the job of Software Engineer becomes defined as "anybody who can give the right prompts to the Agent", and that certainly isn't worth any premium salary. Hire kids out of high school! If they hang around long enough to earn a raise, fire them and hire a new batch of gullible employees.
Then hurrah for the no-day work week because everyone's unemployed!