Furthermore, suppose such an open source program existed, how long would it take for it to start replacing remote contractors and then in-office programmers? ["start replacing" as in, say, 10% of human programmers]
Until AI can create an Angular application with a .Net Core Azure back-end that meets ever-changing customer requirements ("can we remove the need for Bootstrap 4? Can we make the integration with Active Directory seamless?") on short notice, not very soon at all!
I'm throwing that out there because that's just one of my current projects, but a lot of programmers do things daily that AI simply isn't intended for.
Or college courses, for that matter. Although since you mentioned 10% you probably mean more in the area of research science, which may be a different story.
I think you are arguing for "Not all programming tasks that can be automated away by a bot that can win IOI / ICPC."
However, what I'm asking is: "Does there exist 10% of programming that can be automated away by a bot that can win IOI / ICPC" ?
Furthermore, I think you are also assuming that human programmers remain static, while the AI has to be a 'drop in replacement for humans.' On the other hand, if we look at AWS -- AWS didn't build some AI that is a drop in replacement for sys admin work. AWS built their own API, humans adapted to it.
It seems to me that in a world where such an IOI/ICPC winning bot existed, programmers would adapt to it (just as programmers have adapted to AWS), by figuring out "how can I leverage this API so that I don't have to hire someone to do FOOBAR"
Think of eg compilers and interpreters. Thanks to them, perhaps you need only one guy to write software to solve a problem that used to take 10 people: 9 people replaced.
A chess program can be trained on a EC2 instance that can possibly beat most grandmasters. My best guess, people will get over it and move on to more difficult challenges. The field of AI has a notorious record of shifting goalposts whenever something previously thought unattainable is achieved.
> how long would it take for it to start replacing remote contractors and then in-office programmers?
Although I don't think it's possible to replace "programmers", if such scenario does evolve, we would have come up with newer jobs that didn't existed before. Podcasting, Youtuber, UX Designers didn't exist 20 years back. Hard to guess what will come forth.
I would argue that all of research is like that - once something is achieved, people will want to do better things.
After all, it's not an argument.
You can see some of the simpler programs that can already be generated on page 12.