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...

Eh, the industries went pretty long with the title being programmer? Didn't it only start with faang that things kept getting sillier? Tbf, I wasn't yet in the job market before the dotcom bubble, so maybe it only seems like it to me who started in the 2010s