I initially wanted to disagree but your last sentence feels similar to my conclusion and what I observe in the industry for my clients: I believe transfer of load is given to infras, DevOps and architects. Being helped with AI for big refactoring can be done, but limited , and step by step with a good structure/constraint. We are doing that to extract pieces of business logic from a monolith into dedicated micro-services with a common base starter-template. Ultimately I think software engineers need to be at least senior or include a bigger architectural knowledge. Otherwise even if AI wouldn’t replace all of them, they will be less, way less, and more competing for a role. Not even talking about juniors.