Yours is so far the most insightful comment I've read on the page. Have an up vote.
"The common man" often seems to think that mastering the syntax of a programming language is the hard bit, and that replacing textual syntax with some pretty graphics will magically make software easy to build.
Of course, the real challenge is accurately specifying what you're trying to accomplish, and exactly how you want it to happen. Everything else is just window-dressing.
There's a lot to say about uml and the "model" approach history. One bit of trivia, I did my internship at an old IBM acquisition, that shop had made its own process/modeling philosophy with a dedicated environment in the 80s (the reason it got successul with some big clients thus IBM interest). Coming there I thought it would be yet another rational-like thing. But that old console program had live modeling relationship between layers, the model thang was implicit, a beautiful thing. Now replaced by whatever Eclipse based rational children IBM forced onto the teams now.
Imagine an app where you can fix your own car without any mechanical knowledge. The user simply explains the problem to the app and the app figures it out. In every scenario the app ends up directing you to an actual mechanic.
That's my best analogy to "programming without programming".
I just changed the alternator on my truck - you have to wait for the exhaust to cool before you do it, disconnect the battery and then punch the security code into the radio when you're done.
A business person trying to write their own software (assuming they're not also a developer and that they believe some magic tool will let them complete it) will end up with painfully burned hands in the process and at the end they won't be blissfully listening to music again.
But why wait for a powerful AI, if you can hire / enslave developers today?
That's where we spend the majority of our time and always where things go horribly wrong in SciFi movies.
Halfway through 2016, "a programmer with 1 year of experience" using nothing by Python, numpy and a couple of spare weeks could roll their own convolutional neural net to identify images with high-90-percent accuracy.
I dunno about you but that sounds like a significant advance to me.
That's actually the point.
A bonus comment for the youngin's ... When you hear that some new system will allow "the common man" to write his own software without developers, smile and agree with them because they'll come back when it doesn't go as planned and you can charge a higher rate for the resulting expedited project.
EDIT:
I should also admit that I liked (like?) the idea of writing code using diagrams. In the '80s I wrote a program I called "Flo-Pro" in Turbo C that never quite became self-compiling. It wasn't at all OOPsish or FP. In the '90s I wrote several tools in Prograph [0] (now known as Marten) but was stymied by the fact that I was the only one in the company using the tool. In the early aughts, I tried URL tools that promised to write my code from the diagrams - it worked for very simple code but I never saw round-tripping work.
I love drawings in general - my coworkers joke that it's not a meeting unless I have a dry-erase marker in my hand. But those diagrams are invariably system-level, architectural drawings. As others have noted, I also appreciate ERD as a way to visualize relationships in RDBMS. So as much as I like the idea, development stays in the world of text - I'm not holding my breath for some magic bullet.
[0] http://www.andescotia.com/