Sean Goedecke, a staff software engineer, making the case that his own profession is more automatable than he’d like:

As a staff engineer, my work has looked kind of like supervising AI agents since before AI agents were a thing: I spend much of my job communicating in human language to other engineers, making sure they’re on the right track, and so on. Junior and mid-level engineers will suffer before I do. Why hire a group of engineers to “be the hands” of a handful of very senior folks when you can rent instances of Claude Opus 4.6 for a fraction of the price?

He’s not panicking. He’s doing the math. The orchestration layer—communicating intent, reviewing output, keeping things on track—is the last part standing. Everything below it is compressible.

This maps directly to design’s version of the same split. Engineering is plumbing. It lives behind the wall. Quality gaps in invisible work hide behind the interface. Design is the wall, the tap, the handle. Users see it, touch it, judge it. That doesn’t make design immune, but it means the automation sequence is different. The invisible work compresses first.

Goedecke on what would need to change for AI to fully replace him:

I don’t think there are any genuinely new capabilities that AI agents would need in order to take my job. They’d just have to get better and more reliable at doing the things they can already do. So it’s hard for me to believe that demand for software engineers is going to increase over time instead of decrease.

No breakthrough required. Just incremental improvement. That’s the scariest version of the argument, and designers shouldn’t assume it stops at engineering.