[sam-cop-vimes]

I feel for the author, but I'm not sure we will ever get to the point where programmers are replaced. Building a software product requires so much more than just writing some code. Yes, pretty soon most of us might not be writing individual functions or modules and rely on code generation instead. But to even produce a collection of cooperating services which deliver a coherent UX still requires hundreds of small decisions to be made. Our Lego blocks got bigger.

We didn't feel the same impact moving from assembly to high level languages probably because there was a smaller programmer population perhaps? And computers weren't underpinning the lives of all people.

IMHO, the danger with the current trend isn't necessarily the change to the day job of a "programmer". It is that this leads to a concentration of power in a small group of people. Then again, computer hardware were always the produce of a very small number of players and we managed to live through that without too much of a catastrophe. In aggregate, the world got better. Like with any new technological development, there are pros and cons. It is up to us as a society to amplify the pros and attenuate the cons.

Yes, writing a beautiful piece of code by hand is fun - and yes, the days of doing purely that for a living are probably disappearing soon, but there is no going back. Make peace with it and evolve.