Heavy pressure ahead for software engineers.

Software engineering is the one role where the 10× engineer myth came true — but only if you read the small print. It's the engineer plus the model.

Automation is moderate and rising hard. Boilerplate, scaffolding, routine refactors, test stubs, standard CRUD — the model handles it. GitHub's own studies show Copilot users complete tasks 55% faster on routine work. Multiply that across a team and the leverage is real.

Augmentation is HIGH. Code review at higher throughput, bug investigation with stack-trace explanation, architecture exploration, library scouting. The good engineers turned into half-engineer-half-reviewer in 2024-2026. They love it. The bad ones turned into prompt-and-paste engineers and shipped bugs faster.

Resilience holds because system design, production debugging under live-incident stress, security threat-modelling, and the historical context of "why is the codebase like this" don't transfer to a model. The juniors getting hurt are the ones who never learned to read code carefully because the model was always faster than them. Hiring for code-review is the new lever.