I would argue this can never be true. If software gets to a point where today's problems can be solved by a 5-minute specification, engineers will be able to do

I would argue this can never be true. If software gets to a point where today's problems can be solved by a 5-minute specification, engineers will be able to do more high-level engineering, connecting dots with those building blocks. One example is memory management: At some point, we started having languages and powerful-enough hardware that engineers didn't have to worry about memory anymore (for certain classes of applications), so they could spend more time thinking of other things. It's not like switching from C to Java would cause a software company to get rid of 40% of its devs because there's now less work - it's just that one hindrance is gone. But there's always plenty to do; the backlog never gets emtpy.