Maybe I'm an outlier, but my story contradicts yours. I started developing S/W professionally in 1986. It was cool for more than a decade. Then around 2000,

Maybe I'm an outlier, but my story contradicts yours. I started developing S/W professionally in 1986. It was cool for more than a decade. Then around 2000, software shifted to web dev and mobile, and I lost interest. Before 2000, we wrote code largely from scratch. After 2000, coding increasingly became copying-and-pasting from some ginormous S/W framework written by a committee. (That's why AlphaCode works.) The coder becomes a user. Don't write a function, call somebody else's function. That's programming by proxy. Tech has changed. To me, that style of programming is a lot less fun.