And that is quite a thought. Sure, we senior craftspeople celebrate writing elegant code, constructing beautiful class hierarchies, and designing working software. But I will admit that a lot of the work is tedious, and having an unflagging coder grinding out the “dirty work” is a really nice thing.
But it can become more than that. Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least. The results are the same. You can dabble as much in code as you want. You can check every line, merely review the overall architecture, or, if you are like me, you can be quite content with moving past the grind of actually writing code to orchestrating the process and ensuring the proper final result.
Nevertheless, I feel Josh’s angst. I will miss the satisfaction of writing the lovely procedure that does one thing cleanly and quickly, of creating the single object that does everything you need it to do and nothing more, of getting things working just right. All of that is gone, as are the conductor’s days of playing a spotlight solo. It’s hard, but it’s where we are.