Literally all new products nowadays come with a great degree of software and hardware. Whether they are a SaaS or a kitchen product.

Programming will still exist, it will be just different. Programming has changed a lot of times before as well. I don't think this time is different.

If programming became suddenly too easy to iterate upon, people would be building new competitors to SAP, Salesforce, Shopify and other solutions overnight, but you rarely see any good competitor coming around.

The necessary involvement behind understanding your customers needs, iterating on it between product and tech is not to be underestimated. AI doesn't help with that at all, at maximum is a marginal iteration improvement.

Knowing what to build has been for a long time the real challenge.