I don't work in the very high end stuff, where the real money, and the real challenge is. In fact, I've never actually worked as a pure programmer at all, and

I don't work in the very high end stuff, where the real money, and the real challenge is. In fact, I've never actually worked as a pure programmer at all, and only very briefly worked on projects where the programming was the main challenge. A lot of what I do is pretty much just prompting, but with the Google and IDE autocomplete instead of AI, using libraries, etc. Average boot camp coder level stuff. Because I'm not here because of any particular interest or talent for abstract logic, I'm here to tell you all the ways that EMI is going to mess with your I2C bus, and to have lunch with the plumber and make sure he likes the pump control timings, and make sure the users like the UI. When I have a project with some real programming, doing new algorithms and data structures and finding the logic in a system, it's a pretty fun novelty, but not an everyday thing, and I don't think I would enjoy something like writing a new compiler. If I had the math skill for research science or high end hardware design (The simpler stuff is a lot of what I do, along with firmware, maintenance, and some very basic non-critical mechanical), I'm not sure how much I'd miss programming. I really like the repeatability, the fact that you can run unit tests and deliver something you can be very confident will work. I like the mutability, the fact that anything with a computer is automatically a multipurpose, general device. I like the ability to replace real physical things with ones and zeros that can be perfectly copied with almost no cost, reducing the amount of items we need, and the space we need to store it, and the time to organize it all. I think I'd be absolutely miserable in primitive society with no computers anywhere, but I would probably be just as happy as a journalist or researcher, or in industrial controls.