Perhaps you meant to say "coding", not "programming". AI is immensely helpful for programming. Coding is just the last, and in a proper programming session sometimes even unnecessary step - there are times when an adequate investigation requires deleting code rather than writing new one, or writing pages of documentation without a single code change.
You have to be a detective and know what threads to pull to rope in the relevant data, digging inductively and deductively - soaring high to get the "big picture" of things and diving into the depths of a single code line change.
I've been developing software for decades now (not claiming to be great, but at least I think I've built certain intuition and knack for it), and I always struggled with the "story telling" aspect of it - you need to compose a story about every bug, every feature request - in your head, your notes, your diagrams. A story with actors, with plot lines, with beginning, middle, and end. With a villain, a hero, and stakes. But software doesn't work that way. It's fundamentally an exploratory, iterative, often chaotic process. You're not telling what happened - you're constructing a plausible fiction that satisfies the format. The tension I felt for decades is that I am a systems thinker being asked to repeatedly perform as a narrator, and that is hard.
Modern AI is already capable of digging up me the details for my narrative - I gave it access to everything - Slack, Jira, GitHub, Splunk, k8s, Prometheus, Grafana, Miro, etc. - and now I can ask it to explain a single line of code - including historical context, every conversation, every debate, every ADR, diagram, bug and stack trace - it's complete bananas.
It doesn't mean I don't have to work anymore, if anything, I have to work more now, because now I can - the reasons become irrelevant (see Steve Jobs' janitor vs. CEO quote). I didn't earn a leadership role - AI has granted it? Forced me into it? Honestly, I don't know anymore. I have mixed feelings about all of it. It is exciting and scary at the same time. Things that I dreamed about are coming true in a way that I couldn't even imagine and I don't know how to feel about all that.
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