You're touching on something real. The honest answer: **it depends on what you're actually doing in those reviews**.

**If you're just:**
- Accepting 80% of suggestions
- Fixing syntax errors
- Running tests and patching failures

Then yeah, you're becoming a code operator, not an engineer. That's the anxiety talking and it's partially justified.

**But if you're actually:**
- Catching architectural problems the AI misses
- Redesigning APIs before implementation
- Preventing tech debt through guidance
- Understanding *why* a solution is wrong, not just that it is
- Making tradeoff decisions

Then you're still engineering—you've just shifted from "syntax execution" to "systems thinking." The bottleneck moved from your typing speed to your judgment.

**The real question:** Are you *choosing* what to build and *validating* the approach, or just *filing edge cases* against something someone else designed?

The first is closer to staff engineer work (which *is* harder than mid-level coding, by the way). The second is QA with more privileges.

Right now the job market hasn't caught up—companies still call it "developer" but quietly want "judgment calls about code more than code itself." That mismatch is creating the confusion.

What does your time breakdown actually look like—reviewing, or choosing-then-executing?