If you had an AI capable of writing the code you mean to without errors, the demand for software developers would be even larger than what it is today.
Deciding what problem to solve and how to solve it is hard enough to sustain more than the current population of developers. (But if you had an AI capable of deciding those, then yeah, that would be problem.)
Anyway, the current crop of highly hyped AIs are obviously structurally unable to do either. And it's not clear at all how far any AI is from solving any those (what usually means we are many decades away).
If we had a specific quantity of software that was needed, that might be a good argument. But to me, it looks like the quantity of software we want is unlimited. (Or at least, the quantity of stuff that we want software to do.) To the degree that GPT enables the same software to be written with fewer programmers, to that degree we'll write more software, not have fewer programmers.
It's possible everything will speed up, and since the competitors are also speeding up some kinds of arms race on steroids will take place where not only are we all much more productive but we are also not cutting back on workers.
I find it hard to believe but I concur it is possible.
How much better would software be if a team of five individuals could produce the same output as a team of 500 individuals?
How much terrible software is out there? How much terrible FOSS software is out there?
How much amazing and humanistic software could be created if the costs for production were drastically reduced and the demands of the market were less of a factor?
