>I believe an argument can be made that the bulk of what goes for "programming" today is simply hooking up existing pieces in ways that achieve a specific goal. When the goal can be adequately specified[1] the task of hooking up the pieces to achieve that goal is fairly mechanical. Just like the business of tracking trades in markets and extracting directional flow and then anticipating the flow by enough to make a profit is something trading algorithms can do.

right, but when python came into popularity it's not like we reduced the number of engineers 10 fold, even though it used to take a team 10x as long to write similar functionality in C++.