I think these are much different. Trucking depends on humans due to infrastructure and complex problems of law, vision, last mile details, etc. I agree about near term limitations of this kind of model, but I think highly contextual and refined models for software will prove to be powerful enough (edit: by powerful enough, I mean powerful enough to transform how people write software) in many cases.

Software reiterates a lot, and generated solutions can be quickly vetted. A truck driving to the wrong destination or locking up en route is a much larger issues than a few seconds spent determining that a generated solution has a bug or doesn’t match a spec exactly.

If AI can stand on the shoulders of giants and people can vet its outputs, I’m fairly sure it will become more capable and safer to implement than self driving trucks, much faster.

The question I have is that if we can build more, faster, will we run out of work or will more people simply make more things?

There are huge incentives for wealthy companies to run more and more code on their infrastructure. Can we do more business digitally? Will it scale to provide more programming work, even if it’s heavily AI-assisted?