Depends what you mean with "AI". Actual intelligence? Yeah, maybe. LLM? No, they don't actually reason, an activity that Einstein did a lot of and without which coming up with his theory would have been impossible. He didn't just go on a random walk like what LLM temperature is doing.
Well, depends on the software project itself and where you are in its development lifecycle but:
- (1) A lot of developing can be just chores around managing scaffolds and repeatable work, and due to this macros, autogenerated code and other tools have been a thing at many layers for a long time; and
- (2) I remember copy-pasting from Google/StackOverflow (i.e. mostly search + pattern matching with some minimal reasoning) being criticized as a low-effort mode of development during the 2010s, before ChatGPT and AI assisted coding tools took over that part.
So yes, I'd argue a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever actually reasoning from first principles, AI tools just made that more visible.
Who knew that such a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever "actually" reasoning.