Writing up a rough sketch of a program is what much of programming amounts to these days - calling black-box APIs, packaging up data and pushing it around, etc.

Writing up a rough sketch of a program is what much of programming amounts to these days - calling black-box APIs, packaging up data and pushing it around, etc. So far, this has only helped the field grow. Maybe in the limit, the building blocks will all be standardized in the perfect balance of abstraction, security and efficiency. I doubt it but even so, people will still keep rearranging the blocks into novel systems to solve (or create) new problems. It will be a different face of programming, but probably not as different as the gulf between punch cards and dragging WebBrowserControls onto FancyPanels.