Oh, it will improve by several orders of magnitude.
But even then, it's not 'replacing' you.
It's just going to let you spend less time on BS and more time on the things that are your maximal value contributions to a project.
If I had a dozen junior or mid level devs you could hand work off to, would that save you time? Would you kick back and not review what they were doing, particularly around business critical parts of the software?
The conversation around AI has become obscenely binary, pulling from (now obsolete) SciFi influences to cast it as humans vs machines.
But it's a false dichotomy. Collaborative efforts are almost certainly where this is going, and 100% human or 100% AI will both be significantly inferior to a mix of both.
For sure it will still mostly make sense to have a division of labour where you have people who are focused on building software.
The question is if generative AI is powerful enough to reduce the number of programmers needed to achieve a task, without creating enough opportunities to replace those programmers.
Before we are all replaced there could be a moment where demand for software engineers is 10x less.
Society would simply demand more capable and complex software. Specialized industrial applications that currently look like windows 98 java apps would be expected to be as polished as iOS.
I don't think there is some natural law that dictates we will need enough new software that we will always increase demand in the face of efficiency gains.
For industrial applications in particular they need to be functional and operable, not shiny.
But even then, it's not 'replacing' you.
It's just going to let you spend less time on BS and more time on the things that are your maximal value contributions to a project.
If I had a dozen junior or mid level devs you could hand work off to, would that save you time? Would you kick back and not review what they were doing, particularly around business critical parts of the software?
The conversation around AI has become obscenely binary, pulling from (now obsolete) SciFi influences to cast it as humans vs machines.
But it's a false dichotomy. Collaborative efforts are almost certainly where this is going, and 100% human or 100% AI will both be significantly inferior to a mix of both.