----
Wanted to chime in as someone very minorly on the hiring side. Run a business, used a remote contract developer for a decade. They were reasonably productive, but with a communications lag due to timezones and back and forth communication. Their rate also rose in the past couple of years.
We have completely eliminated their role and I took over the dev work using ai. I learned some programming a decade ago which helps oversee the ai.
In doing so I was able to see their code wasn't up to spec. Outdated php with deprecated functions, some very inefficient functions which added multiple seconds to pageload. Refactored everything and our site is up to date and substantially faster.
I doubt this is a common case, most clients likely aren't personally replacing their developers. But at the low end of codework it's certainly possible to replace a dev with ai. Compared to our developer ai provided:
* instant feedback * Technically up to date code * More efficient methods when prompted how to approach a problem
Crucially our developer didn't want to use ai and preferred handcrafting code. Also didn't use it if they found something I wrote unclear, which could add 12-24 hours to a communications cycle.
I presume they're still doing work for their other clients. But from my perspective the opportunity cost of using them rose tremendously when they refused to try new tools.
Thinking through code architecture has tremendous value. Physically crafting the actually expression of those thoughts in lines of boilerplate code has definitely declined in utility. Don't know how many programming jobs this describes but ai is definitely nibbling at the lower end of the market.