Question: To create an AI does it require code?

Any computer solution needs code – even if that code is embedded in a chip that is supplied with the computer. So yes somewhere there is a lot of code in any AI solution.
However we have got to the point where some code is so complex that we rely on computer algorithms to generate the code for us.

There is no doubt that the development of AI and computer science have made huge strides forward over the last few years. For example it is not so long ago that I used to explain how difficult it was to get a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog. Superficially they are very similar.
They both have four legs, a tail, two eyes, a mouth with sharp teeth, fur etc. Trying to program a computer to tell the difference using lines of code is almost impossible, yet most three year old children have little difficulty in telling the difference. However with the recent developments in AI it is possible to train AI with thousands of images of different cats and dogs so that the AI learns the difference.
I say all this because it is important to understand that modern AI relies not just on the lines of code but also the huge amounts of data that it is trained on.