>The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
Think of it another way:
You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.
Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.
The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.
Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?
I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.
At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”