My PhD supervisor and I talked about this, as the creation of a new category of IT worker: a component assembler . It is less hardcore than a "real" programmer

My PhD supervisor and I talked about this, as the creation of a new category of IT worker: a component assembler . It is less hardcore than a "real" programmer, but we are now at the point that you a person can create great value by assembling pre-existing components and create genuinely new things. The components amount to an abstraction, and the key questions are whether you can make an abstraction layer that is simple, and yet also powerful enough to accomplish worthwhile tasks without needing to break the abstraction. As examples, consider components in fields of engineering: nuts, screws, nails, resistors, capacitors, chips etc The difficult part seems that putting these components together itself becomes a complex and difficult task. However, if we are prepared to limit the power, it is possible to make it simpler: consider audio components that plug together; or bicycle and car components. Maybe this is limited to "customization", but for some purposes, that's all you need to do. And with components that are sufficiently powerful, perhaps you really can build really useful new things. Glue languages, like Python, already facilitate this to some extent, although the process of assembly is more complex than the blogger wishes, and of course people can and do real programming in Python.