[overflow897]

I think articles like this have the big assumption under them that we are going to plateau with progress. If that assumption is true, then sure.

But if it's false, there's no saying you can't eventually have an ai model that can read your entire aws/infra account, look at logs, financials, look at docs and have a coherent picture of an entire business. At that point the idea that it might be able to handle architecture and long term planning seems plausible.

Usually when I read about developer replacement, it's with the underlying assumption that the agents/models will just keep getting bigger, better and cheaper, not that today's models will do it.

[layer8]

There is a high risk that the systems that AIs build, and their reasoning, will become inscrutable with time, as if built by aliens. There is a huge social aspect to software development and the tech stack and practices we have, that ensures that (despite all disagreements) we as developers are roughly on the same page as to how to go about contemporary software development (which now for example is different than, say, 20 or 40 years ago).

When AIs are largely on their own, their practices will evolve as well, but without there being a population of software developers who participate and follow those changes in concepts and practices. There will still have to be a smaller number of specialists who follow and steer how AI is doing software development, so that the inevitable failure cases can be analyzed and fixed, and to keep the AI way of doing things on a track that is still intelligible to humans.

Assuming that AI will become that capable, this will be a long and complex transition.