Exactly. Isn't it already a big pain when the guys who wrote the code left long back, and you're left with some truly puzzling stuff that is not well-commented or documented? I'm not sure "asking the AI" will be of much help here.
It is going to be incredibly easy for people to be the 100x programmer who always delivers on time and promptly leaves for a higher paying job, leaving the debris in the hands of some poor sod who knows nothing about the code or the decisions that led to it.
What AI will do in this scenario is make the "creative" part much easier and jolly and the maintenance part much more painful and frustrating.
One of scale, I think. If we currently have a problem where it's possible to churn out, say 2x the amount of code we can keep up with maintaining, AIs may be able to churn out, say 100x or 1000x.
What I hope is that we'll also figure out ways to get AIs to help us just as much with the debugging and verification part as well. But I think it is current a bit ominous that I don't see a breathless article per week on the improving-software side, like I do on the writing-code side.
But yeah, if AI can make us 1000x faster at writing code and 1000x better at fixing it when it isn't working right, then that will be awesome! I'm just a bit skeptical that's where we're headed at the moment.
It would probably be much worse because there will probably be much less commonality between jobs.
Today a tech job in whatever tech, will at least use the common tools of that tech.
AIs allow you to eliminate as much of the supply chain as possible and do it in house. And eliminating as much of the supply chain as possible will be done for very good reasons: efficiency, flexibility, supply chain attacks, etc.
Imagine a world in which every client has their own different tech stack. A world in which there are no longer Java, Python, .net, JS, etc. jobs. Instead there are only company specific DSL jobs.
It is going to be incredibly easy for people to be the 100x programmer who always delivers on time and promptly leaves for a higher paying job, leaving the debris in the hands of some poor sod who knows nothing about the code or the decisions that led to it.
What AI will do in this scenario is make the "creative" part much easier and jolly and the maintenance part much more painful and frustrating.