I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.
@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.
None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.
BASIC was around long before that. The others were designed and written by programmers.
Lars Wirzenius
The Penguin of Evil
Dave