I've seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career. I think the earliest expression of this that I've found was a quote from the 1980s

I've seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career. I think the earliest expression of this that I've found was a quote from the 1980s. So, people have been saying this for a long time. In the early 2000s, I thought they were probably right, because a half-drunk baboon could put together a working application using VB6 (and later, if he sobered up, he could do the same with .NET WinForms). RAD was a real thing, and I thought it signaled the end of the high-salary programmer. I was wrong. Looking at modern tech stacks, none have productivity tools that are contextually equivalent to VB6 and .NET's WinForms. So, I think we're still wrong about this prognosis.