On the other side of the spectrum, AI can certainly produce very trivial code that just needs to appear to work and no tests. One question I would have there is: if you know what you are doing, are you really faster prompting the AI to generate code for you than writing the code directly? I would argue that for something completely trivial, I can completely imagine that I have written the code in vim before the IDE integrating the AI has even loaded.
The remaining part is something that is not "too hard" (autonomous car) and not "too easy", where the AI helps the developer get something that appears to work faster. What about correctness? If you let the AI write tests for you, you need to review them, right? Reviewing is tricky, because it's super easy to overlook something. As a maintainer of open source projects, many times it takes me longer to review a PR than to actually write it myself from scratch. How can AI help with that?
And my final question is: when you have a bug in the codebase, does the AI find it for you? Because if you have to debug it yourself, it may not be fun to have to dig into AI-generated code.
All that to say that I am not convinced that AI makes development fundamentally faster, but at some point it makes it very annoying: I am not a tester because I like coding more than testing without ever seeing the code. AI has the potential to make me hate my job, and it's not even clear if it will be doing it better.
> Think about how many startups are just basically building a CRM right now.
Sure, and with AI they will be replaced by the same amount of startups building a CRM with AI.