[ben_w]

I suspect this already applies more broadly than just programming.

I was already reading similar stories something like a decade ago in law, with the claim then being that the first thing most law graduates did to learn the ropes and get practical experience was being automated by simple file search and almost everything being digitised (might be "digital discovery", but also I might be conflating terms).

Last I heard (may be out of date already), robotics and computer vision is currently a dichotomy of either {not good enough} and/or {not fast enough} to be a "junior gardener" or a "junior hairdresser", so this (probably) isn't yet true for all roles, but I suspect it may be true for most* desk jobs.

* not all, most: if you need a human face somewhere, the GenAI real-time conversation agents do still sometimes mess up and TTS out the | and < that come from the LLM, but other than that…