[hackinthebochs]

History isn't a great guide here. Historically the abstractions that increased efficiency begat further complexity. Coding in Python elides over low-level issues but the complexity of how to arrange the primitives of python remains for the programmer to engage with. AI coding has the potential to elide over all the complexity that we identify as programming. I strongly suspect this time is different.

The space for "AI-assisted higher-level languages" sufficiently distinct from natural language is vanishingly small. Eventually you're just speaking natural language to the computer, which just about anyone can do (perhaps with some training).

[dragonwriter]

The hard part of programming has always been gathering and specifying requirements, to the point where in many cases actually using natural language to do the second part has been abandoned in favor of vague descriptions that are operationalized through test cases and code.

AI that can write code from a natural language description doesn't help as much as you seem to think if natural language description is too hard to actually bother with when humans (who obviously benefit from having a natural language description) are writing the code.

Now, if the AI can actually interview stakeholders and come up with what the code needs to do...

But I am not convinced that is doable short of AGI (AI assistants that improve productivity of humans in that task, sure, but that expands the scope for economically viable automation projects rather than eliminating automators.)