> My thesis is that AI will fragment the role of software engineering. It will become a role with a large pool of low-skilled coders who move forward with AI and a few specialists that will unblock those coders when stuck as well as address performance bottlenecks for production-scale.

This sounds like outsourcing on steroids. Joke aside, what the software engineering will become really depends on the growth of the industry. Many people thought that most of the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to India and software engineer as a profession would soon die in the US. It turned out that the investment to software engineering far outpaced outsourcing, and as software engineers we were incredibly lucky to work in this field. The trend will not last forever, though. If it turns out that the growth areas in the world do not require much of novel software engineering, then the demand of this profession will dwindle, and the investment will diminish. As a result, our jobs will be outsourced or replaced by AI to a large degree, as AI is really good at slicing and dicing mature code for mature use cases.