Maybe long term we will lose our jobs but medium term there will be huge demand for people who can clean up the mess which was created by people who used AI to generate code without understanding what they did.
The only question is: does anyone want to do that job (and I doubt that the "maintenance" job will be better paid than the job for originally writing the code)?
I think it will be well paid but not fun at all. I have done similar work and at least cleaning up after bad human developers is often well paid. But time will tell.
> at least cleaning up after bad human developers is often well paid.
I wish!
"This was written by Bob, who's a certified genius. Unfortunately Bob left us to go backpacking across Chile. Can you make just this one tiny change for us?
...
What do you mean, billing for a full day? Bob used to be able to dive right in and make changes like this in 5m!"
Bad coders leave managers with wrong expectations and saddle us with their smoldering piles of garbage and now we have to convince Mr. Manager why we it's impossible to match Mr. Monkey's pace.
We are literally stuck paying off someone else's debt, and it's soul crushing, because you know Mr. Manager won't understand anything technical, and the true culprit, Mr. Code Monkey is already long gone, and we are the sucker holding the bag, getting blamed for late features and slow delivery.
The life lesson I learned is: don't pickup someone else's code, you'll assume all liability.
