Indeed, a programmer's job feels artisan oftentimes. I think a reason for it is that projects are often ill defined from day one. They are defined by people who

Indeed, a programmer's job feels artisan oftentimes. I think a reason for it is that projects are often ill defined from day one. They are defined by people who do not know enough about the system to set good requirements. The engineer works both bottom-up from the existing primitives of an existing system and top-down from requirements and tries to solve the puzzle where both approaches meet. Such work is very hard to automate. I believe there is a very big opportunity for AI to be used in a workflow such that inconsistencies between requirements, on all levels, and actual systems become clear a lot faster. The feedback loop to the requirements will be shorter, prototypes will exist sooner. The current workflow has little space for an AI worker. I believe this will change and have a major impact on the art of developing products. The AI programmer is still at its infancy, let's talk again 5 years from now.