Code should not need to be done by humans at all. There's no reason coding as it exists today should exist as a job in the future.
Any time I or a colleague are "debugging" something, I'm just sad we are so "dark ages" that the IDE isn't saying "THERE, humans, the bug is THERE!" in flashing red. The IDE has the potential to have perfect information, so where is the bug is solvable.
The job of coding today should continue to rise up the stack tomorrow to where modules and libraries and frameworks are just things machines generate in response to a dialog about “the job to be done”.
The primary problem space of software is in the business domain, today requiring people who speak barely abstracted machine language to implement -- still such painfully early days.
We're cavemen chipping at rocks to make fire still amazed at the trick. No empathy, just, self-awareness sufficient to provoke us into researching fusion.
The question is perhaps not if we should have empathy for them. The question is what we should do with it once we have it. I have empathy for the cabbies with the Knowledge of London, but I don't think making any policy based on or around that empathy is wise.
This is tricky in practice. A surprising number of people regard prioritizing the internal emotional experience of empathy in policy as experiencing empathy.