Most people will say no, there will simply be more coders and projects. This is wrong. AI having the ability to write code will mean that eventually it will not be prone to many mistakes and that there will be highly skilled jobs perhaps to oversee AI projects, but keep in mind people will write AI to create tests to make sure the code does what it should.
Why do test cases matter? Well imagine the AI knows it did something wrong, it could continually try, perhaps after the 100th attempt a human would step in.
So what will happen to coders?
- It is likely that there will be a new paradigm shift in coding that perhaps we cannot see clearly. Some coders, will have to direct AI, because there might be 100 ways to do something, but some might be better. For example, valuing security or efficiency. How do you value those? That relies usually on judgement of an individual situation.
Why use a human? Likely most companies will want to have more transparency and understanding of their code and the decisions made to guide AI.
- Many will be focused on the artistic and user interface side of things
- Some will need to be the team between the manager and AI since for a while it will be difficult to streamline AI code straigh into a product.
- Interestingly enough perhaps some coders will be needed to create libraries for AI to use as we might restrict what AI code can access.
- Security and Hacking, although AI will help, likely coders will be needed because you can't have an infinite attempt metric to solve something as you might tip your hand. So a human with AI likely will be needed for back and white hat hacking.
- Anything with accountability will need a human; otherwise, likely a bug causing death or injury will be seen as negligent to have AI do it alone. Similar to self-driving cars, the biggest obstacle might be legal issues.
- Anything involving specific code scenarios. AI is trained on all code, but real time code for example has different requirements and approaches.
Or perhaps they will find a new line of work. It is scary how many people have been trained as programmers who might find the work availabilty dry up. Perhaps no one will need jobs soon.