There are many aspects of programming that I don't think will be automated any time soon. Most software projects have under-specced requirements that the progra

There are many aspects of programming that I don't think will be automated any time soon. Most software projects have under-specced requirements that the programmers must tease out; there are tradeoffs to be made based on what is important to the customers, there are architectural decisions, testing and QA, documentation, communication, etc. A lot of my day to day consists of trying to understand what is meant to be built, finding out what the edge cases are or where the requirements break down, making sure that the proposed solutions have the scalability, performance or reliability properties that are required, making sure that the software will actually solve the customers problem, documenting proposed solutions as well as complete software. Testing and debugging. Basically, only a small amount of my time is actually spent writing code. If we still have to formalise what we want, before the automated tool can create the software for us, then that formalisation is programming. Even if it will be higher level than what we have now. Maybe eventually many or all of these will be automated, but I don't believe it will be "one of the first white collar jobs to be automated".