To some extent... This is already the world we live in. A lot of code is unreadable without a lot of effort or expertise. If all code was open sourced there would almost certainly be code written to do just about anything you'd like it to. The difficulty would be finding that code and customizing it for your use.
I imagine some sort of segregation would happen where the "machine cities" would be somewhat removed from the general human populus. This would be to ensure the machines could use whatever information transport system they desired, unencumbered by the needs of the human populous, and vice-versa.
At a certain level of compute, I prognosticate that a certain level of logistical optimization would be trivial to advanced intelligences, and could be accomplished with almost-literally no effort using left-over cycles from whatever big calculation they were doing.
This would start to define different roles for humanity and machine. With logistics essentially "solved," a programmer would be a human-machine interpreter, sometimes journeying to the machine cities to disceminate needs of the people, or define a good way to introduce new technology to the populous.
This could look something like: During a headlining musical act, a "programmer," recently-returned from the machine city, grabs a mic and says "Does anyone want some of this BLUE, GLOWING, NON-RADIOACTIVE SELTZER WATER?" At which point the crowd would go wild. "If you liked that, just wait until you see what's coming next week!"
So essentially the programmer role becomes a hype-man for new, emergent technologies.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a decent book on its own merits - but don't go into it expecting that to be the main point of the book (I did, and disappointed as a result).
But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disappoint.
Can't speak to the sequel as I gave up on the series after that, but it's _really_ not relevant to the plot or ideas of the first book at all. All that matters for the plot is that a hostile, powerful, uncontrollable AI arises. In the book, it _happens_ to be because of a code archeologist "delving too greedily and too deep"; but the plot would not be changed one iota if it had simply arisen (and gone off the rails) as a product of general AI development.
But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disapoint.
Two of my favorite reads of the last few years, so I highly recommend them.
Futher... After some digging it looks like there is an old slashdot discussion on the same topic: https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/04/0622246/no-more-coding-f...
Likely some spoilers for the books in there so may be worth holding off until after you've read them if you intend to.
A lot of software engineers would spend a portion of their day tracking their volatile stock / options etc. in those years.
Is GPT actually saving you any time if it can't actually do the hard part?
For example, I took text document with headers for table names and unordered lists for table columns, and had it produce a database schema which only required minor tuning, which I then used to generate sqlmodel classes and typescript types. Then I created an example component for one entity and it created similar components for the others in the schema. LLMS are exceptionally good at this sort of domain transformation, a decent engineer could easily crank out 2-5k lines/day if they were mostly doing this sort of work.
The abomination: prompts being reused by way of yaml templating, a Helm chart of sorts but for LLM prompts. The delicious combination of yaml programming and prompt engineering. I hope it never exists.