I have the opposite take... there's a program I use (and ties me to Windows) called WikidPad[1], it's a personal Wiki, written in Python. The win32 version works great, and because it's compiled (back in 2018), the binary should do so forever. The Linux distribution is source based, and broke when WxWidgets changed the name/nature of some key parameters to its calls.
I'm a Pascal programmer, not a Python programmer... but I'm hoping that I can leverage CoPilot to help me navigate the nitty gritty boilerplate that would otherwise take days to sort through, and get to the heart of the refactoring/patching necessary to get WikidPad up to date and fix the breakage.
I see GPT4 and kin as tools to allow more freedom of action, and less worry about the stuff I always hated anyway, the minutiae of coding.
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>years of domain knowledge
Usually the term "domain knowledge" applies to real world non-programming knowledge such as chemistry, manufacturing, etc. This is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. We produce a product with zero marginal cost.
I suspect you are in the same emotional place that accountants were, the first time they saw spreadsheets in use. It must have seemed like the end of the world to them, but it wasn't.
>all these students going into CS are in for a rude awakening
As long as they know that computers are a tool, not the end result, they'll be fine
[1] https://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/