This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US.

I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough).

The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing new code without a brain behind it, but once you get to the point where you need to refactor code, you start really needing someone with coding experience to guide the AI or veto it's mistakes.

I don't think that's really fixable even with a lot better AI. It's not something that ultimately comes out of the likes of github data.

I'm not saying that AI isn't going to make things better, btw, I just don't think we'll see a 20x improvement. Probably more like 1.5 or 2x.