It's true that the 'dream' has been here for ages, but I do think that automation might force us to rethink our job in the digital industry.
I recently published an extensive article about the current state of these 'code machines', if developers might lose their job to them and what our options are. If you're interested, you can read it here: https://medium.com/design-and-develop/code-machines-29b066b6...
Bottom line is that I don't think that developers should feel intimidated by machines right now, but not be surprised by their rise either.
Not your coding skills, but your business will define if you’re still needed. If you’re coding basic low-cost websites at a high pace, you might run out of business faster than you might expect. If you can do it by repetition, a machine certainly can do that too. If you’re building crucial online services with a lot of custom functionality, the machines will have a harder time to keep up. Don’t worry about the need for your skills, worry about the need for your current business.
Right. It's not that software engineers are going to go away, just that more and more cookie-cutter software will be buildable by less-technical people (eg. like what Wordpress has done for basic websites and what Unity has done for game development). Advances in NLP and A.I. will probably make code more English-like (eg. like SQL), or at the very least abstract away all the syntax quirks and other tedious low-level bullshit.
Most software engineers are constantly reinventing the wheel (even if they don't realize it because that wheel hasn't been open-sourced yet), and that is the work that will be automated away. But of course the cutting edge will always require programmers (like someone above me commented). But don't be surprised if programming looks a lot different in the future than it looks today.
I think software engineers tend to glorify the act of typing lines of code into a text editor. Code is simply a means to an end.
The thing is, is making a website with those services faster than with code? Even if it is slighly faster, they only work well for the 80%. The last 20% of features are impossible and you're back to code.
I'd rather worry about higher and higher level programming tools that make programmers more productive. Hobo comes to mind (http://www.hobocentral.net/) and Meteor, both making roughly orthogonal aspects of web programming easier and faster.
I can imagine there are a lot of companies that don't sell Scrum right. For example: teams are still ordered to fulfill a fixed scope in a fixed amount of time. As a team you can't fight that. It's not the fault of the team.
But from your article I understand 'Low Quality Code' and 'technical debt' are always the fault of Organizers. I don't agree on that.
A team estimates (led by their scrum master) how long they will be working on a user story. It's their responsibility to take everything account that's needed. They know how much time has to be spent to get the code right.
The Product Owner just gets the estimates from the sprint planning and knows how far the team can get. The team said they could do a particular user story in 5 points right? If that's 5 points with crap code as a result... well, maybe it was a too optimistic estimate with no space for good code.
I recently published an extensive article about the current state of these 'code machines', if developers might lose their job to them and what our options are. If you're interested, you can read it here: https://medium.com/design-and-develop/code-machines-29b066b6...
Bottom line is that I don't think that developers should feel intimidated by machines right now, but not be surprised by their rise either. Not your coding skills, but your business will define if you’re still needed. If you’re coding basic low-cost websites at a high pace, you might run out of business faster than you might expect. If you can do it by repetition, a machine certainly can do that too. If you’re building crucial online services with a lot of custom functionality, the machines will have a harder time to keep up. Don’t worry about the need for your skills, worry about the need for your current business.