I guess it's because throughout the lifetime of this profession, we have not witnessed a development like this. We went from punchcards to assembly to compilers to javascript, but at no point was it a process that would just "keep going" until you turned it off, much like a motorized machine.

I would disagree that "the grievances" are not fundemantel. The _profession_ of the programmer is about to cease to exist, much like the human computer. Sure, you can still compute without a computer and perhaps enjoy it, but you will not find anyone to pay you to do it. Whatever you think "babysitting an LLM" is, it's not programming, even if presumably programmers are fairly well suited for it.

Which is why none of us have or want job titles with "programmer" in them; even juniors are junior software engineers. As long as a human is needed to design and implement good software, they will be software engineers. The temporal affordances aren't nearly as unique as you imply, either: generated code and unit test results are two good examples of things that "keep going... much like a motorized machine".

That is, unless you treat the agents as if they were people and thus the true engineers, of course. I think that's a fascinating philosophical topic despite ultimately disagreeing, but to say the least it's incredibly controversial to even consider the personhood of agents, much less endorse it.

This is all moot anyway, so apologies if I'm rude or overly dismissive of your comment that I agree with the general thrust of. No point starting fights over deck chairs...