it might be dangerous to hold on to the idea that "being a good software engineer" is still important
it's true today, but for how much longer?
it might be healthier to disassociate yourself with that identity sooner than later
your software engineering skills are going to be increasingly devalued with every SOTA model that drops
depending on how good you are, you may not even survive another SOTA model drop
maybe you'll survive the next 2 or 3, and with the rate of acceleration you should expect this to happen pretty quickly anyway
so maybe it's worth derisking that now by exploring other skill trees