I think it's subtly different in a very important way: there are a zillion developers doing almost the same thing everyday with almost the same mistakes.

The devil is in the almost. That's where the inability to trivially design a framework to cover all those cases comes in. That's the little subtle differences in business logic, that turn into different flavors of tech debt, that keep people in a job for a long time.

Tools and abstractions will improve, but here's the flip side: have you ever worked on a project where you consistently delivered 100% of what the stakeholders asked for, on time, with no negotiation or compromise needed? I haven't, so I think the more we can deliver, the more that will be asked, for quite a while.

I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it.

Kind of the way a compiler generates optimised machine code from our higher level languages now.

Also don’t forget - we still have to write certain routines in Assembly even after so many years. Number of abstraction layers doesn’t mean complete automation.

Going from high level to low level code will not go away. But, for the most part you would probably try to get something working and then optimize it. http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

>I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it.

We've tried. The problem with layers of abstraction is that they're leaky, and don't always work.

For example, simple SQL is easy. Optimizing SQL requires intimate knowledge of your db engine.

Yeah, I imagine the formal logic being quite strict, maybe requiring formal verification. It wont stop business-leaky-cases, but it might give us something deterministic that is better than what we have - we dont need perfection, an order of magnitude (or 5) jump in productivity would do...

Doubtful, debugging would be so hard at that point. I think we’ve already reached peak abstraction where we are right now, and more indirect forms of programming will be increasingly non-viable.