Even if are right here (and I think you are), software engineering can still be dead.
We haven't seen that in software development though. Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art.
[1] https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
Copying isn't just how design works, it's how everything works. Humans are imitation machines.
We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses.
Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar ideas concurrently.
I think the space where juniors can thrive in this New Normal is to fill in the gaps in written form. Seniors don't know what we know. I'm constantly finding implicit knowledge I assume a junior possesses that they in fact, do not have an inkling that it even exists. Lo and behold, the loops and harnesses don't, either. That's why they come to me asking the questions they ask in the first place.
Holding that brief junior perspective, filling in those innumerable gaps while learning everything else being thrown at them via the agents, is critical at this juncture for the agents to be able to bootstrap themselves from ever-broader, ever-vaguer initial instructions. When those potholes are mostly filled, I can think of a lot of other stuff for juniors to work upon, but I am sorely missing this piece with agents at this stage of their evolution, and I definitionally am unable to fill it myself. It is the source of most of my rework of their code output.