If you don't need to read the code at all, what are the engineers doing to make the other issues matter? Deskilling and alienation are still about the relationship between engineers and the code.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?