There's a good Ask HN thread going: "What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?" People are split. Some think we all become tech leads directing agents, some think the human value moves to testing, observability and building consensus, and a few think we're turkeys voting for Christmas. Here's roughly what I added.
I've been doing more fractional work lately, and the outreach has shifted. More organisations with almost no internal development knowledge are realising the limits of what they've been building and wanting an expert look at it. There's going to be plenty of that work.
The bigger question is how we upskill people if they're not going through the learning process we did. That problem already exists. Plenty of people have "senior" in their title with shallow expertise, because most of their career was picking up tickets with acceptance criteria handed to them. I'm not talking about the best of the best here. I'm talking about the other 90%.
Inside organisations, there's still a lot of room for the very human back-and-forth on what you're actually building, and for navigating politics and org structures. What excites me is the appetite to build. Companies that couldn't imagine owning their own stack now want to. They're about to learn the ups and downs of that for the first time, and there's plenty of opportunity for us all there, too.