I don't think that's the argument. The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete once the agentic tools become good enough to allow domain experts to fully iterate on solutions on their own.
That’s been the argument since the 5PL movement in the 80s. What we discover is that domain expertise an articulation of domain expertise into systems are two orthogonal skills that occasionally develop in the same person but, in general, requires distinct specialization.
A Lotus 1-2-3 vibecoded by a Product Manager in 1979 would probably had a hotkey for a calculator.
> The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete
Though my big concern right now is that we'll get rid of juniors and maybe even mid levels. There's definitely a push for that and incentives from an economic point of view. But it will be disastrous for the tech industry if this happens. It kills the pipeline. There can be no wizards without noobs. So we have a real life tragedy of the commons situation staring us in the face. I'm pretty sure we know what choices will be made, but I hope we can recognize that there's going to need to be cooperation to solve this least we all suffer.
I believe that business analysis and computer science are essential domains, of (respectively) properly defining the logical/mathematical constraints of problems, and of understanding what it means to solve such problems. But software engineering is "accidental", in the sense that no one other than us in the industry actually cares about what we do, but rather only about their use-cases implemented; what we do is just implementation details.
I don't have a magic ball, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a century, (human) software engineering goes the way of the switchboard operator, elevator operator or knocker-upper.