I don't know what programmers of today need to realize that programming is first and foremost an activity of human thought, like any other field such as mathematics or engineering. Just because engineering has made improvements in producing certain tools, that does not replace the activity of engineering itself.

Is the average engineer of today's significantly better than the engineers during Renaissance? Programmers have a habit of fixating their own activity on certain tools, be it a programming language or any of these "silver bullets" that supposedly can replace the activity of programming as a whole.

Brooks said it decades ago, there are no silver bullets. Programming will always be hard, no matter whether your IDE starts connecting magically with your thoughts or can write bloated prototypes within a few minutes.

This remains the case for all engineering fields much older than software engineering, no amount of "innovation" in machines ever replaced good engineers entirely.

Forget even the activity part, there is a deep theoretical (read: mathematical and logical) problem at the heart of automating computation that has simply not been touched due to all attention being put into stochastic methods.

Do we even theoretically know if all computation can be automated? Do we even know what such computation theoretically looks like? We are not even asking these questions, we are throwing random statistical shit at the wall and praying it sticks most of the time.

A few years ago, somebody told me that whatever the industry accepts as mainstream is technically "the best way". If the rise of stupid LLMs has shown anything it is the exact opposite of that, industry—like any other market—cares nothing other than what brings profit to the private entities.