One way to think about ai programming is that it's another step on the continual ladder up from writing machine code to writing more in more 'human readable' programming languages. It's essentially a non-deterministic compiler from natural language to an intermediate representation like python. Even assuming it was able to near perfectly translate intent to code, that doesn't mean it will replace programmers, necessarily.
The way to think about the impact on employment is comparative advantage. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as... Even if AIs are better than humans at every programming task, there is still a limited amount of compute in the world and unlimited amount of potential work to do, so there will always be tasks available for humans to work on. If the cost of writing code becomes cheaper, there will be tasks to automate that aren't worth the effort to automate now, that will _become_ worth the effort to automate in the future.
Some people are against a technology which isn't mature enough. I don't know about word processors, but take digital photography for example. Some people stuck with film photography even after digital became cool because it was superior in some regards (such as dynamic range). Once digital improved in every way over film, those people moved too.
Another reason is job security. Why would someone support something that will leave him homeless and destitute just because the software will be superior?
Personally, I think that software engineering jobs will go up while AI assisted programming is perfected (10-20 years), and afterwards there will be a huge decline (10x shrinkage) once the tools won't need people anymore.
IDEs can be useful, but can also weaken developers. People get used to the IDE keeping track of bloated, overly complex interfaces. Autocompletion also leads to a style of development where every term must be defined before it can be used in any code. That may seem to make sense at first, but in practice means that it becomes impossible to freely sketch out code paths without first defining all terms. Depending on context this may all be appropriate and valuable, but it is worth keeping in mind that IDE saturated development has particular characteristics and may potentially amount to a crutch or even an impediment.
That’s like being against IDEs or git.
It’s like writers who were brought up on typewriters being against word processors.