Do you think the scribes in the monasteries were relieved when Gutenberg built his press? Hand-copying manuscripts was their craft, their identity, their livelihood — and here was a machine threatening to make it irrelevant. Some of them were right that their specific job was going away. They were wrong about what that meant.
I want to answer that question by pointing a magnifying glass at the current landscape of program-centric jobs.
I'm a design engineer. I would not say I'm fully AI-pilled — but after a conversation with old friends who are talented, experienced software engineers, listening to them call it overhyped, what I hear underneath that isn't a technical argument. It's an identity crisis. "Overhyped" is almost always what people say when they mean "I'm not sure where I fit anymore."
Here's the thing they're missing: their knowledge is the prompt.
Auto-tune didn't make everyone worth listening to. It lowered the floor, it didn't flatten the ceiling. The artists who used it best — Kanye, Madonna, Daft Punk — already had taste and vision. The people who just switched it on still made bad music. AI is the same. A mediocre engineer with AI is a mediocre engineer. A great one with AI is something closer to a force of nature. It's the bicycle for the mind.
The leverage on expertise just went through the roof.
What actually makes a senior engineer valuable is knowing which questions expose the bad assumptions. Smelling a wrong answer before the tests run. Understanding why a technically correct solution is architecturally incorrect. That intuition took years to build and it cannot be prompted into existence.
My engineer friends aren't becoming obsolete. They're becoming rarer. They just can't see it yet because they're too busy mourning the parts of the job that were never the valuable parts.
Agentic coding tools elevate the baseline. The scribes who thrived after Gutenberg didn't stay in their monasteries — they became editors, authors, typesetters. The press didn't satisfy the hunger for books; the number of books published exploded, and so did reading and literacy. This is Jevons paradox all over again: as a resource becomes cheaper, demand increases.
So are you going to be a grumpy scribe or Gutenberg.