> > The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves.
If that's their fear they don't know much how your typical big businesses functions.
You've dealt with a large, consumer bank? Many of them still run on IBM mainframes. The web front end is driven by pushing buttons and screen scraping 3270 terminal emulators. You would think a bank with all it's resources could easily build it's IT infrastructure and then manage all the technology transitions we've gone through over the past few decades. Clearly, they don't and can't. What they actually do is notice they have to adapt to the newfangled IT threat, hired hordes of contractors to do the work, then fire them when done. After it's done they go back to banking and forget all the lessons they've learnt about building and managing IT infrastructure.
If you want to see how banking and computers should be combined, look at the Fintech's, not banks. But for some reason I don't understand traditional banks still out compete Fintech's. Maybe it's getting your head around both banking and running an IT business it too much for one human mind?
That same pattern is repeated everywhere. Why was everyone so scared of Huawei? It wasn't because they built the gear. It's because the phone telco's have devolved into marketing and finance companies who purchase in the gear from companies like Huawei and rent it out. Amazingly they don't know how to run the gear they purchased, instead get the supplier to install it and maintain it. But that meant what some eyes viewed as an organ of the Chinese communist party was running the countries phones with full access to every SMS and voice call. (Interestingly, IBM pulled the same stunt with the banks back in the day: you didn't buy an mainframe, you leased / rented it from IBM, and they maintained it.)
It's the same story everywhere I look. These big firms stick to the knitting. If you want to see total, utter incompetence in IT go work whose core business doesn't revolve around IT for a while. These are the firms that still choose Microsoft, despite the fact they've seen Sony's Microsoft based IT infrastructure torn apart so badly by North Korea they didn't know who their employees were, how much they owed creditors or how much debtors owned them for a while. Why do they choose Microsoft? Look around - who else allows you to outsource the know how about connecting millions of computing devices in 1000's of offices to a redundant cloud infrastructure that allows them to share data while providing a centralised authentication / authorisation infrastructure. There is only one choice, apart from developing it themselves which is out of the question.
If those businesses did start using what passes for AI today to manage and develop their own IT infrastructure, the result would not be pretty. But for all the shit I'm throwing at them here, I'm confident they are smarter than that. They know their limitations, they haven't done it before, and they won't start doing it now.