Backend engineer (Go). Building https://cresting.dev - hourly momentum ranking of AI agents, MCP servers and AI dev tools. Ranks by velocity instead of total stars; formula published at /methodology; organic rank is never for sale.
Is not one or the other. AI is a tool for the Engineer. Costs more? Depends on how you use it. You can reduce AI costs in multiple ways, accepting the tradeoffs.
Before, there were programmers and software engineers. I have seen in many places how companies used to hire people just to implement features, with no other work to do than that. If you were a programmer, you just wrote the code. Those are now in quite a bad position.
Instead, software engineers have used tools to solve problems while taking into account constraints like money, time, capacity, and uncertainty, utilizing all available resources. Now, AI is simply another tool to obtain the end result and solve the problem. The way we do things has changed, and we need to adapt. However, I think software engineers will always be necessary.