What I'm picturing is two divergent paths with very different impacts on human interaction.

1) Every human programmer becomes the surgeon in Fred Brooks's surgical team model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_sur...) and AI provides the rest. In effect, all working human programmers are software architects in the sense that they exist in large companies. The unstated assumption here is that going from vague user input to a solution is roughly equivalent to AGI, and so is further out than anything on the immediate horizon.

2) GenAI is used as a sort of advanced template/snippet/autocomplete system.

The first one is a fundamental paradigm shift. Professional programmers don't cease to exist, but the profession becomes inherently smaller and more elite. The bar is higher and there isn't room for many perfectly intelligent people who work in the field today.

The second one is a force multiplier and is helpful, but is also a much more banal economic question, namely whether the tool generates enough value to justify the cost.

I have no complaint either way and I'm definitely interested in the next step beyond what we've seen so far. The hype implies that the first branch above is where everything is headed, hence the "death of programming as a profession" type articles that seem to be making the rounds, but that isn't what I've seen day-to-day, which is what prompted the original thought.