[dingnuts]

> the grunt work of implementing it all

you mean the fun part. I can really empathize with digital artists. I spent twenty years honing my ability to write code and love every minute of it and you're telling me that in a few years all that's going to be left is PM syncs and OKRs and then telling the bot what to write

if I'm lucky to have a job at all

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I think it depends on the size of the project. To me, the real fun of being a developer is the magic of being able to conceive of something and then conjure it up out of thin air - to go from an idea to reality. For a larger more complex project the major effort in doing this is the solution conception, top-down design (architecture), and design of data structures and component interfaces... The actual implementation (coding), test cases and debugging, then does become more like drudgework, not the most creative or demanding part of the project, other than the occasional need for some algorithmic creativity.

Back in the day (I've been a developer for ~45 years!) it was a bit different as hardware constraints (slow 8-bit processors with limited memory) made algorithmic and code efficiency always a primary concern, and that aspect was certainly fun and satisfying, and much more a part of the overall effort than it is today.