AI is not going to replace engineers. In fact, the opposite is happening.
The thing experienced engineers carry is all of the context that actually matters, the edge cases and the production failures and the stuff you only really learn by shipping real things to real customers, and that context is the whole game. A smart model can write a ton of code very fast, but knowing what to build and why, and how it actually serves the person on the other end, that still lives with the (humans/engineers/designers).
A lot of the time you do not need the big bazooka. The job gets done with a few smaller tools working together plus some lightweight checks to verify everything, and a good engineer knows when to reach for the heavy agent and when something much simpler is going to ship faster and break less.
Factory AI has been quietly building toward this for a long time now, and every feature they ship compounds into the next one, which is exactly why Matan’s point lands so hard. Value the engineers, and then hand them the factory.