What you are saying is true. In a way, programmers still need to think about and wrestle with architectural complexity. And I agree the biggest overall gain is adding another layer of abstraction. But combine those two things and suddenly you have junior engineers that can very quickly learn how to architect systems. Because that will be the bulk of the job and they will be doing it every day.
Once you remove all the roadblocks with syntax and language blindspots, the high cost of refactoring, the tedium of adding validation and tests, the challenges of integrating systems... suddenly, the work becomes more pure. Yes, you need to know how to do advanced structural things. But you don't need to learn very much about all the rest of it.
And we very quickly get to a point where someone who can break down problems into tidy Jira tickets is effectively programming. Programming was never really about learning languages but making computers do things, which is a transferrable skill and why so many engineers know so many languages.
Even the simplest tickets sometimes that end up requiring a one line change can require hours of investigation to fully understand/stamp the effects of that change.
And perhaps I havent used the greatest or latest, but in my experience LLMs break down hard st anything sufficiently large. They make changes and introduce new errors, they end up changing the feature, or worst case just ouright break everything.
Id never trust it unless you have an extensive amount of good tests for validation
Once you remove all the roadblocks with syntax and language blindspots, the high cost of refactoring, the tedium of adding validation and tests, the challenges of integrating systems... suddenly, the work becomes more pure. Yes, you need to know how to do advanced structural things. But you don't need to learn very much about all the rest of it.
And we very quickly get to a point where someone who can break down problems into tidy Jira tickets is effectively programming. Programming was never really about learning languages but making computers do things, which is a transferrable skill and why so many engineers know so many languages.