What I&#x27;m thinking of are a subset of your first thing: powerful task-specific interfaces that act somewhat like DSLs, but usually come with a sophisticated GUI. Some examples: Excel, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Ableton. I think (and hope) these sorts of solutions will proliferate and a bunch of good ones could make a major dent in the world&#x27;s need for people who program <i>professionally</i>.<p>I think the &quot;we won&#x27;t be automated away until REAL AI happens&quot; thing is a trap. Certainly it&#x27;s true that there will be some programmers working professionally until that point, but I see no reason to expect that it will be a huge number.<p>I wish I could agree with you more that &quot;learning to code is just learning to be very precise with your instructions&quot;. I&#x27;m sure there are some programs that stress that, but most of the things I see (especially those targeted at adults) are more focused on the minutia of how we actually write professional software in 2015, because they are targeting job re-training rather than the acquisition of a skill that is broadly useful.<p>In summary, I&#x27;m just not convinced that &quot;learning to code could be a useful insurance policy&quot; is the right message to be sending. Maybe I&#x27;d be on board with something more like, &quot;learning to code is probably better than the alternatives&quot;, but that leads me to think that we could use some more alternatives.