We all know the famous quote from the preface of SICP:
... we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
But now that people almost exclusively use AI "code assistants" to write the code instead of them, can we still claim that programming has any use for the thinking person? Hasn't it fully degraded into mindless drudgery?