Developers are not going to go away, but the cushy high salaries likely will. Skill development follows a logarithmic curve where an AI boost to junior devs will be much more than the boost given to senior devs. This discrepancy will pull down the value of devs as you will get "more band for you buck" from lower tier devs, since the AI is comparatively free.
Although I also wonder about the development of new languages that may be optimized for transformers, as it seems clumsy and wasteful to have transformers juggle all the tokens needed to make code readable by humans. That would be really interesting to have a model that outputs code that functions incredibly but is indecipherable by humans.
Junior devs don't always understand enough to know why something should or shouldn't be done.
I don't think junior devs are going to benefit; if anything, the whole role of 'junior' has been made obsolete. The rote / repetitive work a junior would traditionally do, can now be delegated wholesale to a LLM.
I figure, productivity is going to be increased a lot. We'll need less developers as a result. The duties associated with developers are going to morph and become more solutions / architecture orientated.
Although I also wonder about the development of new languages that may be optimized for transformers, as it seems clumsy and wasteful to have transformers juggle all the tokens needed to make code readable by humans. That would be really interesting to have a model that outputs code that functions incredibly but is indecipherable by humans.