alt Hacker NewsSpot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to 'the programmer problem' have failed.
Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But originally compilers were supposed to kill off the programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's). Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code' because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe it when I see it.
Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with AI).
The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed. But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded solution that is in production at some presumably secure installation.
I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we will be seeing a lot of.
In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.
Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.
Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.