The title is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but this line from @pdyc's article Is ChatGPT making me lazy has me thinking about the virtues that older software required you to cultivate:
I tried it, and it didn't work as expected, so I complained to my newfound colleague, Mr. ChatGPT, and it gave me a new script and asked me to report back. I was already getting a weird feeling of becoming a slave of AI where it was instructing me what to do instead of the other way around. Anyway, the script had a bug, and after asking ChatGPT to change the logic, I got a working script.
Now, obviously, taking this logic to the extreme, why not just go back to writing all software in C, or your architectures assembly languge, or why not wire up the circuits yourselves:
Or why bother with wires? Why not use butterflies?
Okay, despite that reductio ad absurdum, the point stands. Computer programmers have been able to be less and less skilled over time. The accelerationist response is: Yes. Get in loser, we're going into the Singularity!
The decel response is: regulate AI, require the software industry to have licenses and credentials to program computers.
I personally am thinking about something different, about how to keep the old DOS/BASIC and UNIX/C hacker ethos alive through the ages the way Latin was preserved by the Catholic Church. This is an old skill that is worthy of being preserved, instead of cursing the new bots, we should preserve the computational DOS maiorum.