My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.

An art analogy:

Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.

If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.

The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.

Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.

For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.

This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.

And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.

The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.

Edit:

The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.

I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.

That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.