There are claims that AI has solved writing code. This implies that we have recreated the outsourcing model.
The problem is that writing code is not the goal. We really want to solve problems and find using a computer to do the job is the most efficient way to do this. A large part of the value I bring is to understand how a system works. That way we can make changes that improve the existing system.
Some years ago a project was run at a company where I worked. The manager thought it was clever to hire a team of the cheapest developers he could find. The team was limited to 7 people since that was the power supply limit of the available room. The two permanent developers did their best to give instructions to this team. We had a suite of acceptance tests that was heading to being green as the critical launch day arrived. Two of the team had commit rights revoked due to repeatedly committing broken code.
Not being involved in the project I left the office at my usual end of day time. The next morning I arrived and found out about the chaos that had ensued.
2 of the 7 subsystems deployed to production were simply mocks. These were sufficient to get the test scripts to work.
The team QA had quit twice (the first time being talked down). The two in house devs had to implement minimal versions of the services. Mangement had introduced a no-one goes home til this works policy after I had left. The devs had been checked into a nearby hotel late that night!
In the end we had a shop that could not sell anything until halfway through the next day.
It took about a year to get the system into a sane state before we replaced it again.
Management had considered this a success. This was mostly due to us eliminating an Oracle DB that would have cost a fortune to renew.
This is what happens with a small team of developers. This is exactly what people are doing with AI. They are generating systems from incomplete specifications.
Developer Rants 