Here is a comment on lobste.rs which made me sit a bit and think. https://lobste.rs/s/qvomvk/why_are_we_even_doing_all_this#c_wbfsf7

It says some things I've been thinking myself, but that I probably would never be able to properly put into words (for self-deprecatory reasons).

The full quote:

"What I would propose instead is that the practice of programming is about improving and formalizing our understanding of processes and systems, for the benefit of our shared humanity and all the life of this planet. This is neither "just" craft, nor mere production, it is a calling in alignment with the entire history of philosophy that contributed to the discovery of computability and of the ideals of the enlightenment. This view positions programming as a calling alongside the sciences (wherein we also have applications in industry that are fundamentally connected to research in academia).

The function of "software" as a concept has been do commoditize one material result of the practice of programming (executable programs) and to segment IT labor. Since LLMs can automate the production of many executable programs, it is indeed poised to destroy the industry oriented around software production, so defined. But programming is a higher calling, with a much longer history, that includes the cybernetics efforts of the mid 20th century, the formalization and mechanization of computability, developments of formal reasoning, of mathematics, of economic planning and analysis, of metaphysics, of the emancipatory aims of the enlightenment: it draws from and continue sall of these essential activities, and the fact that LLMs can perform inscruitable, referentially opaque, probabilistic computations and (unreliably) produce executable programs does nothing to undermine or threaten the meaning of the practice -- not, that is, unless we surrender the meaning and purpose of our work to the misapplication of LLMs by those seeking to seize control of our rational use and ownership of our own means of computation."