Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
I’m not so much worried about the functionality of the code, but rather the maintainability. A lot of code was written, by a person long ago, copied together from forums online refactored by people, who didn’t understand it, but at least at some point someone understood it good enough to create it.
I find the idea worrisome, that we will deal with code no one ever understood, it’s just kind of there and seems to do what we want, and now you have to change it.