Most of the work software developers do is comprehending the problem, formulating a solution that addresses the problem, and doing it in a maintainable, performant, and security conscious manner.
I think AI can write a killer isEven() method, I think it’s shit at everything I listed… it’s extremely shit at being security conscious, any dev can tell you that it’s easier to write code and confirm it’s following best security practices then it is to review someone’s code and confirm it’s following best security practices… I think AI actively makes it harder to have confidence in security.
The first real part of my job I think AI will help with is performance tuning. We’re not there yet but I think we’re not unimaginably far from being able to give an AI a working but slow function and have a computer spin up a million randomized test inputs and outputs… then start scrambling the algorithm in a plethora of ways and testing the performance while confirming that the test cases pass.
Then again, you’ll need to confirm the algorithm is still secure - but I think the realm of performance is the first place we’d see a tool that I’d demand a license for.