It's happened a few times in my career where people tell me I'll be obsolete, but it's always been some company hyping their new product and suits frothing at the prospect of not having to pay me anymore.

So far they're like 0 for 8 or so.

Now I will say the goalposts move. What I'm doing now is for sure not what I was doing 10 years ago. I'm definitely heavier in devops and infra than where I was before (ironic because they said we'd never have to worry about that stuff again if we moved to the cloud). AI is still basically machine learning, just in a while loop, so I've spent time learning that. So, in a way, yes we're obsolete in the sense that if I was the same engineer I was 10 years ago I wouldn't be worth nearly this much, I had to grow and evolve with technology.

If a tool were created that properly converted an UML diagram into a project without any need for code, all the programmers that lost their job to this tool would then be hired by the company that offered it, in order to give maintenance and support to everything the customers want in their programs.

It would be removing programmers from they payroll of some companies but they would still be working for them, just further down in the chain.

The same is true for AI. If AI could completely replace programmers in some area, it would need a lot of programmers itself to keep dealing with all the edge cases that would show up from being used everywhere that a programmer was needed before.

Dude I WISH an AI would do all the dumb AWS crap for me so that I could just hang out and build React frontends all day

In Neolithic era I guess?

I know this is c/programmerhumor but I'll take a stab at the question. If I may broaden the question to include collectively the set of software engineers, programmers, and (from a mainframe era) operators -- but will still use "programmers" for brevity -- then we can find examples of all sorts of other roles being taken over by computers or subsumed as part of a different worker's job description. So it shouldn't really be surprising that the job of programmer would also be partially offloaded.

The classic example of computer-induced obsolescence is the job of typist, where a large organization would employ staff to operate typewriters to convert hand-written memos into typed documents. Helped by the availability of word processors -- no, not the software but a standalone appliance -- and then the personal computer, the expectation moved to where knowledge workers have to type their own documents.

If we look to some of the earliest analog computers, built to compute differential equations such as for weather and flow analysis, a small team of people would be needed to operate and interpret the results for the research staff. But nowadays, researchers are expected to crunch their own numbers, possibly aided by a statistics or data analyst expert, but they're still working in R or Python, as opposed to a dedicated person or team that sets up the analysis program.

In that sense, the job of setting up tasks to run on a computer -- that is, the old definition of "programming" the machine -- has moved to the users. But alleviating the burden on programmers isn't always going to be viewed as obsolescence. Otherwise, we'd say that tab-complete is making human-typing obsolete lol

The earliest I can think of (from personal experience) is 4GL languages; the early low-code platforms that first started to get traction in the early 80s. They wouldn't have replaced programmers but some thought/hoped they would usher in an age of "low skill" programmers that companies could get away with paying minimum wage to.

Programmers become obsolete when they stop evolving with technology

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