The fear mongering is what you see with any new tech. I genuinely, to my core, believe that there is no near future where LLMs or AI replace engineers.

However, Engineers who make use of AI will replace Engineers who don't.

Look at something like Co-Pilot. The future is AI-assisted programming. We are not anywhere close to general AI that can actually code for a human. They hallucinate with regularity, and the more obscure the required knowledge, the more BS they make up to cover for it.

I work in devops, and the confidently wrong manifests it writes for Istio are... hilarious.