Is there a scenario where just the people that REALLY love programming start in the field? Could this be a situation where you reduce the field of programmers to only those that are truly passionate about programming, thus making the people left in the field the cream of the crop? We have all worked with individuals that are clearly in the field because they think they can make a lot of money and don’t give a crap about doing a good job. Can we envision a world where these people go on to another field instead of clogging up this one?
There is no way. What I am alluding to is that, the only people who will go down the path of being a junior to senior dev are those that truly love the field. It will purge those that only go down the path because they think it will make them a lot of money. Is this good or bad? Only you can decide.
What I didn’t say but should be a given is that these AI tools won’t be able to completely eliminate the need for any human touch, it will just reduce the need to the point where there won’t be the current huge demand for developers, and thus, the only people that travel down that path will be the ones that are truly passionate about development.
In order to be able to make use of the code produced by AI - be it review, validate, fix, integrate or iterate - operator needs to ultimately be better than AI at making software. (Unless we abandon the idea of understanding what exactly software we are running does)
The question then is how exactly does one become better than AI at making software if no one is going to pay you to make software until you are better than AI?
The same issue with art - we need a sea of mediocre artists and a market for their work for great artists to emerge. AI takes over mediocre art market - all commercially driven art disappears.
