Programming is dead. We just refuse to admit it.

Back then, if you called yourself a programmer, you probably had to understand a lot more of what was actually happening. Memory, operating systems, networking, compilers, data structures, how hardware worked, etc. Today you can build an entire application while barely understanding any of that. Use a framework. Install a package. Call an API. Let an ORM handle the database. Deploy it to the cloud. Ask Copilot/ChatGPT when something doesn't work. And before someone says "that's just abstraction": yes, obviously abstraction is useful. But I can't help wondering if we've also lowered the bar for what it means to be a programmer. A lot of modern development feels less like programming and more like connecting things that other people already programmed. I'm not saying old programmers were geniuses or that modern developers are idiots. Obviously there are incredibly good programmers today. I'm talking about the average developer. The average programmer today understands less about computers than the average programmer did decades ago. And honestly, maybe that's fine. Maybe programming was always going to evolve this way. But at what point are we no longer really "programming" and just operating a giant stack of abstractions?