We live in interesting times. For instance, we are witnessing several extinction events all at once. One of them is the massive extinction of species. The other is the extinction of jobs. Both are caused by advances in technology. As programmers, we might consider ourselves immune to the latter–after all, somebody will have to program these self-driving trucks that eliminate the need for drivers, or the diagnostic tools that eliminate the need for doctors. Eventually, though, even programming jobs will be automated. I can imagine the last programmer putting finishing touches on the program that will make his or her job redundant.
But before we get there, let’s consider which programming tasks are the first to go, and which have the biggest chance to persist for the longest time. Experience tells us that it’s the boring menial jobs that get automated first. So any time you get bored with your work, take note: you are probably doing something that a computer could do better.
One such task is the implementation of user interfaces. All this code that’s behind various buttons, input fields, sliders, etc., is pretty much standard. Granted, you have to put a lot of effort to make the code portable to a myriad of platforms: various desktops, web browsers, phones, watches, fridges, etc. But that’s exactly the kind of expertise that is easily codified. If you find yourself doing copy and paste programming, watch out: your buddy computer can do it too. The work on generating UI has already started, see for instance, pix2code.