Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.
Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.
You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.
All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.
I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists