AI rant - I don't feel valuable anymore.

I'm a senior engineer and an AI skeptic, or atleast I was util I started realizing its potential.

Problem 1: In our project when we setup microservices, we are required to setup environment variables. The name of the variable is eazy to get wrong due to the way we have setup our project - the microservice declares the variable which contains the AWS Secret ARN and one of the 2 homegrown npm packages feches the secret and sets the value on another variable. The second npm package makes use of this second variable. Needless to say that this time I got the name of the variable wrong. Intuition and experience told me that it was an issue related to the env variables, so I got Copilot on Opus 4.6 to determine if there was an issue. I also gave the name of the npm packages that it needed to analyze. 5 min later, Copilot said exactly which variable was wrongly named. It analyzed npm packages which didn't even contain easy-to-read source, it analyzed the typescript compiler's output that is extremely frustrating for humans to make sense. I was more than impressed. This is the kind of issue that easily takes more than hour of your time. The kind of silly issue that a junior/mid level developer would seek help from a senior developer and later realize that it was a dumb thing to do.

Problem 2: AWS Stack creation failed due to an id conflict on another stack and none of the resources were created but the empty stack got created with the status REVIEW_IN_PROGRESS. When the error was corrected, the cdk deployment repeated failed with the message that the stack did not exist. I had a hunch that it could have been due to the first failure. Copilot digged deep into another homegrown cdk library and then aws-cdk-lib and determined that the root cause of the error was being lost when the error was being rethrown as an error that was actually misleading. Stack deletion and recreation solved it quickly but this is another example of an issue that could mislead junior/mid developers forever but a senior could fix it. Now AI/Copilot in the hands of a junior developer, can do it too.

I also consider myself above average in sifting through technical documentaion and finding the information that I needed even before the age of AI. This skill along with the deep debugging skills mentioned above aren't valuable anymore.

I spent better part of 17yr of my career helping fellow team members with problems that they couldn't solve themselves. It made me feel vaulable in the team. I was never concerned about layoffs because I felt that I was a key member in the team. With AI, things have changed. Are you a senior developer who feels this way? How are you coping? Feel free to be critical in your comments, I might need a reality check, but don't be an ass. Thanks.

For all those people who want to say that system design is how senior developers now add value to a team in the age of AI, I would like to say that system design is a small part of the job and non-tech managers (scrum masters) don't realize your value through your system designs as much as they did when they realized on a daily basis that you were helping unblock juniors.

Not AI generated post, although this is something an AI could say as well.