[DennisP]

That's been happening ever since the first computers. The first programmers hand-entered machine code, then someone automated that with an assembler. Then the first compiler automated much of the work in writing assembly code. Since then we've gotten ever more powerful languages, libraries, and all sorts of tools. None of this has reduced the demand for programmers.

[ohopton]

Couldn't agree more, that doesn't mean it's always going to be the same. A lot of programming jobs these days are putting information from a database on a screen, then updating it in the database after it's been edited. Doesn't feel like that should be an impossible thing to automate in a fairly sophisticated way. Though that's been true for a long time and we don't seem to have made much progress.

[DennisP]

I spent a lot of my career doing that. There was usually a fairly large gap between what made sense in relational database design, and what was convenient and sensible for users.

[CamTin]

More importantly, "what is convenient for users" will frequently change and be expressed only vaguely by those users in natural language bug reports or feature requests. Converting that natural language into something machine-readable is programming, whether it involves typing cryptic strings into emacs or hooking together components graphically a la LabVIEW.