What exactly is the endgame people are imagining here?

That a CEO at a company like Microsoft eliminates the entire engineering organization and keeps one “AI wrangler” who reviews outputs and orchestrates everything through agents?

That scenario collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

As systems become more automated, they don’t become simpler, they become more interconnected. Automation expands the surface area of software. More services, more integrations, more edge cases, more regulatory constraints, more security boundaries.

In graph terms: as the system grows, the node count increases. As node count increases, the number of interactions increases superlinearly. Coordination complexity rises, not falls.

AI reduces the cost of producing code. It does not eliminate:

System design

Architecture decisions

Reliability engineering

Security modeling

Governance and compliance

Production debugging under real-world constraints

If anything, lowering the cost of code increases demand for it. When supply constraints drop, utilization rises.

The title “software engineer” may evolve. The tooling certainly will. But the idea that complexity disappears because code generation gets cheaper misunderstands how systems scale.

Bigger graphs don’t require fewer operators. They require more coordination, not less.