> Even in a world where AI-assisted code reigns — being a distributed systems expert might be the key to unlocking AI in every program.

This is the aspect of AI that most software developers are either missing or willfully ignoring. AI in itself is a very narrow and deep topic which requires immense amount of domain knowledge and skills, but deploying AI solutions and using AI for business applications is mostly not about AI, but about distributed systems. That is the area where an increasing amount of "labor" will be deployed, and hence the job market is going to see a steep demand for engineers.