This assumes that a future version won't have super-human coding abilities which can write code vastly better than any human. The language it writes in might not look anything like our current languages, because it might be able to write highly efficient code that it would be too slow and impractical for a human to write, and refactoring the entire codebase might happen automatically overnight rather than slowly across months.
In that world the skill won't be to code, but to accurately describe software/business requirements. Unless a future AI can do that too.
There always seems to be a lot of "We Can Do The Thing We Do Today But Faster" in these comments.
It misses that we won't be doing Old Thing. We'll be doing New Thing.
It's not a step change in an old medium. It's a qualitatively different change to a completely new medium, whose properties haven't yet been revealed.
It's like waving an iPhone at Babbage. An iPhone is so far ahead of an Analytical Engine that it offers a completely new and unimaginable set of affordances.
It's also faster, smaller, and more reliable, with much more memory - which is an interesting implementation footnote, but incidental to the fact that from a user POV it's a completely different class of device.
I agree, but that's a long time away, maybe five or six years. Until then (and even after) we'll need people that can interface with lower-level systems and also have prior experience. This also doesn't take into account countries that will effectively ban usage of companies like "Open"AI (which "Open"AI will be more than willing to enforce), and on top of a possible thin-client revolution, we'll see demand for human coders in the new tech-ghetto parts of the world.
Countries would be insane to ban companies like OpenAI. What a huge foot-gun that would be!
Imagine if a country banned computers in 1979 to protect jobs, other countries would have run circles around them and it would have had huge economic implications.
In that world the skill won't be to code, but to accurately describe software/business requirements. Unless a future AI can do that too.