I agree with this. I'm a middle aged engineer and believe it or not there used to be a time when assembly was considered "automation of programming".

Before before assembly you would have to hot-wire individual 1s and 0s into the hardware to program which was a labor intensive jobs. You had to memorize the instructions and data sequence as strings of 1s and 0s.

Then assembly came along and suddenly a lot of the work was simplified to only writing a command that was equivalent to those instructions.

Then there was another big paradigm shift with "high level languages" like C and C compilers.

Essentially ever since C and other compiled languages existed most people haven't truly programmed anymore. Because essentially you're just communicating to a computer program what the computer program should actually program for you.

The C/C++ or Python code you're writing today? That's not actually programming. It's just you telling the computer what it should program for you.

In a way ChatGPT and other systems like it are just a newer higher level programming language. Because you're still communicating to the computer what it needs to program. But it's just in a more intuitive human way.

I don't think the job of programmer is going to go away at all. Just like Assembly didn't crash the occupation or C didn't crash the occupation. It's just yet another layer of abstraction on top of it.

As an old-school kind of guy I have to admit that I liked writing assembly more than C and I like C more than Python. And yet again I like Python more than typing into ChatGPT. But this is how software development has always been. You adapt to the new developments, you specialize into a very specific niche, or you exit the labor market and become a hobbyist.

Young people have too much anxiety about these things because the last ~15 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of big paradigm shifts within programming.

Big shifts like this used to happen every 2-3 years.