That is absurd. Sure some basic AI tools have been helpful like co-pilot and it's sometimes really impressive how it can help me autofill some code instead of typing it out... but come on, there is no way we are anywhere close to AI replacing 99.99% of developers.
>making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done
I don't know.. art is "easy" in the sense that we all know what art looks like. You want a picture of a man holding a cup with a baby raven in it? I can picture that in my head to some degree right away, and then it's just "doing the process" to draw it in some way using shapes we know.
How in the heck can you correlate that to 99% of business applications? Most of the time no one even knows exactly what they want out of a project.. so first there is the massive amount of constant changes just from using stuff. Then there is the actual way the code is created itself. Let's even say you could tell it "Make me an angular website with two pages and a live chat functionality" and it worked. Well, ok great it got you a starting template.. but first, maybe the code is so weird or unintuitive that it's almost impossible to really keep building upon- not helpful. Now let's say it is "descent enough", well fine.. then it's almost like an advanced co-pilot at this point. It helps with boilerplate boring template.
But comparing this all to art is still just ridiculous. Again, everyone can look at a picture and say "this is what I wanted" or "this is not what I wanted at all". Development is so crazy intricate that it's nothing like art.. I could look at two websites (similar to art) and say "these look the same", but under the hood it could be a million times different in functionality, how it works, how well it's structured to evolve over time.. etc etc. But if I look at two pictures that look exactly the same, I don't care how it got there or how it was created- it's done and exactly the same. Not true of development for 99% of cases.
This is especially true for complex pieces.
If an AI could produce a world-class totally amazing illustration or even a book I will afterwards easily see or read it.
On the other hand real-world software systems consist of hundreds of thousands or lines in distributed services. How would a layman really judge if they work?
Nevertheless I also expect AI to have a big impact since less engineers can do much more.