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.
