My suspicion is that it will be bad for salaries, mostly because it'll kill the "looks difficult" moat that software development currently has. Developers know that "understanding source code" is far from the hard part of developing software, but non-technical folks' immediate recoiling in the face of the moon runes has kept our profession pretty easy to justify high pay for for ages. If our jobs transition to largely "communing with the machines", then we'll go from a "looks hard, is hard" job, to a "looks easy, is hard" job, which historically hurts bargaining power.
I don't think "looks difficult" has been driving wages. FAANG etc leadership knows what's difficult and what's not. It's just marginal ROI. If you have a trillion-dollar market and some feature could increase that by 0.0001%, you hire some engineers to give it a try. If other companies are also competing for the same engineers for the same reasons, salaries skyrocket.
I wonder if the actual productivity changes won't end up mattering for the economics to change dramatically, but change in terms of a rebound in favour of seniors. If I was in school 2 years ago, looking at the career prospects and cost of living, I just straight up wouldn't invest in the career. If that happens at a large enough scale, the replenishment of the discipline may reduce, which would have an effect on what people who already had those skills could ask for. If the middle step, where wild magical productivity gains don't materialize in a way that reduces the need for expert software people who can reasonably be liable for whatever gets shipped, then we'll stick around.
Whether it looks easy or not doesn't matter as much imo. Plumbing looks and probably is easy, but it's not the CEOs job to go and fix the pipes.
