I don’t think we were ever supposed to be programmers. A lot of us are scared because they assumed knowing every detail of a system or language and being able to conjure a system with code was the point of your profession. But it was always building things, or, engineering, just with different tools. If we get to the point where we can ask AI to 3d print a spaceship and also build JARVIS into it for navigation, then your job will become something else, like figuring out how to build brain computer interfaces as we get on our way to becoming cyborgs or whatever for FTL journeys. Building interfaces will not be a thing we will do anymore, as UIs will just be conjured on the fly, contextually, by the AI.

Our challenge will always be to keep track of all the foundational knowledge so we can rebuild it all if it comes crashing down (AI or some other event tries to end us).

You should feel exited about it, and level up to the next thing where you will be needed, which is to build reliable heterogeneous, self healing systems, often without having a contract between them.

This will mean you can conjure up an entire tax management system, a financial system, a government management system, quickly and have them all talk to each other so people can just go about their lives.

A dam is built, and you immediately have a system that can operate it and all of its equipment.

This may give manufacturers freedom to innovate without worrying about breaking things. Just install it and let the AI learn it, tell you if it needs to calibrate the new equipment, or adjust the existing system to better integrate it, take better advantage of it, etc.

There is so much to do in that and many other directions (I mean healthcare, etc, why not eat bigpharma’s lunch?) that we should be excited and not afraid. Of course current AI is nowhere near this, and maybe what enables this will be in an entirely different shape, but that we’re all putting effort into getting there instead of worrying about Angular vs React is what I love the most.