> Being able to think "natively" in software is going to be important.
We should not be working to prepare the people of tomorrow for solving the problems of today. When AI will be able to program as well as a common dev, then people will only need to guide it instead of doing the work by hand. People need to learn to work with AI, and current generations are very involved with its incarnations - AI game bots, web search, feed ranking, filtering, recommendations, auto-translation, voice commands, etc.
Current day aeronautical engineers don't need to solve by hand their equations, for them it is much more important to be able to use modeling and simulation tools. Similarly, in the future people will only need to function in relation to the AI of the day. Some aspects of how we used to do things will be lost, other will be gained. It will be a brave new world.
> When AI will be able to program as well as a common dev
I don't believe that will happen in our childrens' lifetimes for arbitrary programs. You are only thinking about half of the problem: the AI understanding code and available libraries. But the other half of what a "common dev" does is understand the person who is telling them what needs to be done. Half of the work of the programmer is to understand what their community actually wants despite their ability to articulate it deterministically. An AI being able to do that for all 6 billion people on the planet is not even theoretically possible at this time. We don't even have the anthropology, sociology, and psychology to model, let alone the computing resources and programmers to do it.
> don't need to solve by hand their equations, for them it is much more important to be able to use modeling and simulation tools.
Having an algorithm available in tool form doesn't remove the need to understand the algorithm. You need to know how it works to know when to use it and what the results mean. There are widespread problems in the scientific community with people using analyses that they don't understand and publishing false conclusions.
The only tools which are used widely and correctly are the ones which are designed well and taught well through widespread cultural practices, which is a tiny subset. Programming literacy will unlock orders of magnitude more algorithms than would ever be refined to that level by the software industry.
We should not be working to prepare the people of tomorrow for solving the problems of today. When AI will be able to program as well as a common dev, then people will only need to guide it instead of doing the work by hand. People need to learn to work with AI, and current generations are very involved with its incarnations - AI game bots, web search, feed ranking, filtering, recommendations, auto-translation, voice commands, etc.
Current day aeronautical engineers don't need to solve by hand their equations, for them it is much more important to be able to use modeling and simulation tools. Similarly, in the future people will only need to function in relation to the AI of the day. Some aspects of how we used to do things will be lost, other will be gained. It will be a brave new world.