I hope that the AI will trigger a shift in software development values.
Most software today is over-complicated, and riddled with vulnerabilities. Over-engineered software is more likely to have vulnerabilities but companies have embraced 'security through obscurity through complexity' anyway because complexity makes vulnerabilities harder (for humans) to find. AI could automate that.
I hope it will force a return to well-designed, minimalist software instead of the current 'security through obscurity spaghetti code' practices we have today.
On the development front, it might also be a positive. Any noob developer can produce ugly spaghetti code which barely just works, and now AI can do it too! What AI cannot produce is simple, human-readable code which can anticipate changes in business requirements; this requires business domain knowledge and common sense.
I think it will go in the opposite direction. If the over-application of junior engineers is the cause of distributed spaghetti architectures then AI is set to make this much worse by driving the business cost of (virtual) junior engineer labor to near-zero.
Once AI is good enough to fully replace juniors, it will become impossible for senior developers to compete in productivity on code alone. Almost all code will be written by AI and senior talent will be operating at the higher level of wrangling AI code and containing it in some sprawling microservices spaghetti ball.
Honestly this isn't so different to the general trend of the last 6 decades. We cheaply "outsource" code to compilers and third party libraries and end up with systems that are globally inefficient but much more economical to build. AI is just going to be the new ultra high-level programming interface.
My pessimist take: What will happen is that libraries and frameworks will only require more pointless boilerplate, because writing pointless boilerplate code is the one thing that AI is really good at, and why optimize for fewer lines-of-code when an AI can spew those out in a second?
My optimist take: Absurdities like the above will lead to a brain drain of people who actually know what they're doing from Silicon Valley into more 'bullshit free areas' where they can do actually useful things.
That's plausible. The optimistic view would be; maybe you could train AI on your own code and have a copyright over your 'coding style'? Then you could lease out bots who code in your style and earn passive income. I have a lot of open source projects to use as training data.
The code I've generated with AI is quick-and-dirty, but as it lacks context from request to request it is also riddled with inconsistencies that I need to straighten out.
...so I expect more buggy software in the short-term.
Most software today is over-complicated, and riddled with vulnerabilities. Over-engineered software is more likely to have vulnerabilities but companies have embraced 'security through obscurity through complexity' anyway because complexity makes vulnerabilities harder (for humans) to find. AI could automate that.
I hope it will force a return to well-designed, minimalist software instead of the current 'security through obscurity spaghetti code' practices we have today.
On the development front, it might also be a positive. Any noob developer can produce ugly spaghetti code which barely just works, and now AI can do it too! What AI cannot produce is simple, human-readable code which can anticipate changes in business requirements; this requires business domain knowledge and common sense.