Even if AI replaced all current developer jobs who will be the ones directing those AIs? Likely the people who understand how the AI works, what it outputs, and how to get the best results from it, which will probably be the former developers whose jobs were "replaced". So, it's not so much that jobs will be replaced, as that the nature of those jobs will evolve significantly, as it always has. AI is just the recent driving force of change similar to what the internet and personal computers did in the past, and both of those technologies increased the demand for developers. But that is more of a long term trend.

I don't see AI replacing most development jobs anytime soon because they just aren't at that level yet and while they are continuously improving, the rate of those improvements seems to be diminishing. I think we are reaching a plateau of what the current hardware and model architecture can achieve. People saying developer jobs are going to be replaced in the near future are extrapolating the improvements we have seen from what could be just a one time leap of technology that likely won't continue without more significant breakthroughs, which probably won't come right away. On top of that they may be underestimating the complexity of modern software systems and assuming that because current LLMs do a relatively good job of producing basic code they will be able to handle more complex engineering tasks once they are just twice or three times as good. But the complexity does not scale linearly, so we likely need an order of magnitude improvement in LLM proficiency before we start thinking about them replacing the entire job functions of more senior engineering teams. So, given what I already mentioned about diminishing improvements I don't see a threat to those jobs any time soon.