This brought an interesting philosophical question: do you enjoy coding itself? Or something else? If you enjoy coding itself IDE or AI agent doesn’t really matter.
Interview skills are somewhat different from workplace skills. So first align your original motivation with the industry requirements. If you find mostly aligned, then sharpen your interview skills.
The requirements for SDE have never been changed. The only changes are people’s expectations and more openings for AI services.
The term of AI is definitely overused on the internet especially on social media platforms. One possible reason might be related to marketing.
The fundamental behind AI is the same thing behind traditional software systems. So for the “AI evangelists” — the needs to be recognized is much stronger than the needs to be a great software engineer.
I am using a metaphor, do you want to play soccer in the playground? Or do you want to be a great fan of soccer? Have you seen soccer evangelists to be great soccer players?
This is a huge topic, but I think it's still too early to conclude that the AI industry is losing.
To me, this looks more like an iterative technology cycle. The frontier labs continue to improve the models, while the agents, tooling, infrastructure, and applications is evolving rapidly. So, as long as the feedback loop between model improvements and real-world adoption continues, short-term losses don't necessarily tell us much about the long-term trajectory.