I can't believe I have to say this, but there are still developers who don't use AI assistants to program. They write code "manually" by reading documentation and reference material, as our ancestors (mostly) did. They might be a dying breed, but they're out there.
Personally, I'm waiting for the space to settle, and for an offline, self-hosted and OSS version to reach feature parity with the proprietary SaaS offerings. Those might exist already, I'm not evaluating the options frequently, but I'm in no hurry.
On-topic: NueJS looks interesting. I'm very worn out and weary of shiny new JS frameworks, but I like the simplicity here. Will keep an eye on the project and consider it again once it matures, but for now Svelte is my best friend.
There are also developers who are better programmers than AI itself, so for them writing code straight away is much easier than thinking about the natural language prompt needed to generate the same code from a non-deterministic statistic machinery.
For a long time, you've had dropdowns while typing that list possible matches.
If you introduce a feature where someone writes
int i=0;
and the IDE goes, "Hey dude, probably writing a loop, should I manage that for you?" and it's C++ 17/20/23 or Rust or Go best practice and looks back a little bit in your code and in its compendium of great project examples to see what the loop logic should/could be...
I would probably let the IDE write the loop header for me. And the string formatting. And modify the function I'm writing to support multithreading. And tell me it looks like I was trying to change each instance of pxX to pxY and graphX to graphY but also forgot to change one rotX to rotY.
Hell, if the IDE could read a PDF datasheet and automatically import addresses and bitfields and assign them to variable names, much of my current career workflow would be automated and I could focus mental effort on more creative work.
No thanks to all of that. Following that train of thought, most programming could be considered a chore. And to me, it's not. I like my tools to get out of my way, and not guess what I'm _trying_ to do, but let me do what I _want_ to do.
Autocomplete is far less intrusive, and doesn't fall into this category. I can quickly refine the results since the scope is greatly reduced, and I don't have to read a large chunk of code to understand whether it does what I want it to do, or whether it introduces subtle bugs I'll have to hunt down later. Besides, we've had code snippets, macros and refactoring tools for decades to help with writing code quickly, so AI tools are not groundbreaking in that sense.
Even once AI tools are absolutely correct in guessing my intention, and write entirely bug-free code, I think I'll still prefer typing code out manually. By that point, AI will be capable of writing complex programs from prose prompts, so that creative work you mention will also be automated away. Yet human programmers will still exist in some form, if nothing for the joy of it. We'll probably value programs written by humans in the same way we value handcrafted tools that are not mass produced today.
Personally, I'm waiting for the space to settle, and for an offline, self-hosted and OSS version to reach feature parity with the proprietary SaaS offerings. Those might exist already, I'm not evaluating the options frequently, but I'm in no hurry.
On-topic: NueJS looks interesting. I'm very worn out and weary of shiny new JS frameworks, but I like the simplicity here. Will keep an eye on the project and consider it again once it matures, but for now Svelte is my best friend.