I could also see an alternative to #2 where it becomes increasingly hard to get a job as a senior dev when companies can just hire juniors to produce probably-good code and slightly more QA to ensure correctness.
You'd definitely still need some seniors in this scenario, but it feels possible that tooling like this might reduce their value-per-cost (and have the opposite effect on a larger pool of juniors).
As another comment said here, "if you can generate great python code but can't upgrade the EC2 instance when it runs out of memory, you haven't replaced developers; you've just freed up more of their time" (paraphrased).
No, programmers won't be replaced, we'll just add this to our toolbox. Every time our productivity increased we found new ways to spend it. There's no limit to our wants.
The famous 10 hour work week right? I am orders of magnitude more productive than my peers 50 years ago wrt programming scope and complexity, yet we work the same 40 hour week. I just produce more (sometimes buggy) code/products.
You'd definitely still need some seniors in this scenario, but it feels possible that tooling like this might reduce their value-per-cost (and have the opposite effect on a larger pool of juniors).
As another comment said here, "if you can generate great python code but can't upgrade the EC2 instance when it runs out of memory, you haven't replaced developers; you've just freed up more of their time" (paraphrased).