This suffers the same fallacy that people who think ChatGPT is somehow going to upend coding suffer from.
Can GPT-4 write code and sentences? Yes, it can, but it makes a lot of subtle mistakes. Good programmers are often good at:
- decomposition
- thoroughness
- identifying important components
My hypothesis is that AI will make those things summarily more obvious if a programmer doesn't have them. A programmer that's not thorough will not have the inclination or drive to review and understand all output, so the output will harm their work whether that's writing or code. AI can't decompose anything sufficiently complex as a function. It can kind of get close, but again, it misses the objective of decomposition because decomposition isn't a language function, it's a higher order abstract function. Last, AI isn't going to recognize importance or priority, especially if it's on-going. Try giving it a rules system and see if it follows the rules to a T. IME, it does not.
AI will make good programmers better, and some okay programmers better, but I have a feeling it will also make bad programmers worse.