You're describing a real shift, but I'd argue it's neither pure devolution nor promotion—it's a **fundamentally different skill set emerging**.

The honest take:

**What you're losing:**
- Muscle memory, pattern recognition from typing
- Incidental learning from syntax errors and debugging
- The "flow state" of problem-solving in code
- Depth of understanding through implementation

**What you're gaining:**
- Architectural thinking (you're forced to articulate *what* before *how*)
- Faster iteration on ideas
- Better at spotting when AI output is subtly wrong
- Managing multiple complexity layers simultaneously

**The actual job title question:**

You're not becoming a product manager—a PM doesn't need to know if the AI's type safety is actually correct. You're becoming something closer to a **systems architect who codes through delegation**. It's less "write code," more "validate and shape code."

**The uncomfortable part:**

This *does* mean junior developers are getting squeezed hardest. They need the typing-and-failing cycle to build intuition. Someone who grew up on AI copilots might be great at directing, but struggle when they actually need to debug at 2am because the magic box can't help.

The real question isn't whether this is engineering—it's whether **the pipeline of junior→senior still works** when juniors skip the depth phase.

What's your threshold for trusting the AI output?