But the bit of data we got in this story is that a human wrote tests for a human-identified opportunity, then wrote some prompts, iterated on those prompts, and then produced a patch to be sent in for review by other humans.
If you already believed that there might be some fully autonomous coding going on, this event doesn’t contradict your belief. But it doesn’t really support it either. This is another iteration on stuff that’s already been seen. This isn’t to cheapen the accomplishment. The range of stuff these tools can do is growing at an impressive rate. So far though it seems like they need technical people good enough to define problems for them and evaluate the output…
Why not? It's still going to be quicker for the AI to use automated refactoring tooling than to manually make all the changes itself.
This was all in the default web chat UI.
This is viewing things too narrowly I think. Why do we even need most of our current software tools aside from allowing people to execute a specific task? AI won't need VSCode. If AI can short circuit the need for most, if not nearly all enterprise software, then I wouldn't expect software demand to increase.
Demand for intelligent systems will certainly increase. And I think many people are hopeful that you'll still need humans to manage them but I think that hope is misplaced. These things are already approaching human level intellect, if not exceeding it, in most domains. Viewed through that lens, human intervention will hamper these systems and make them less effective. The rise of chess engines are the perfect example of this. Allow a human to pair with stockfish and override stockfish's favored move at will. This combination will lose every single game to a stockfish-only opponent.