Business Insider reports that the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a major provider of cloud services, has warned that, within as little as two years, AI could take over much of the software programming work at the company.

If this happens, the change could spread throughout the software industry very quickly, and put many developers out of work.

One problem with this idea is that the track record of AI in writing code is not very good; I am not convinced that AI is mature enough to fulfill this role. Then again, human programmers also have a rather spotty record, as shown by the Crowdstrike incident.

If and when AI becomes capable and reliable enough to take over a major part of the coding workload, I have an idea where it should be used. Banks and financial institutions rely on extremely old code written almost exclusively in COBOL. COBOL is an obsolete language which is no longer taught to programmers, which means that that experienced COBOL coders are hard to find ("like rocking-horse shit") and very expensive. Since there is always maintenance work to be done on this legacy code (to repair bugs, and to adapt to changes in data exchange standards), the exorbitant costs of such changes are passed on to customers (us!). We should give the COBOL coding work to AI, before the few remaining experienced COBOL programmers finally retire, die or become incapable due to dementia.