> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.

I don't know if I agree that this is the bottleneck.

What I can agree on is that as I have aged I now simply REFUSE to learn programming knowledge that has a half-life.

Phone programming? Nope. Front-end web programming framework? Oh, hell, no. Build system of the month? Piss right off. etc.

AI lets me fill in that kind of programming with "acceptable" (read: super crappy but I didn't have to think about it) results because that code won't exist in 5 years anyway due to its half-life.