Didn't most of those programmers from the 60s and 70s have like, Master's degrees in mathematics? Computers were massive, expensive machines that were used largely by universities and research facilities - you definitely couldn't buy your own and teach yourself how to program it like you can now.
yeah, i might not punch my code into cards and i might need a compiler and interpreter, but i can make the computer say hello world in the console window as well!!
We need to understand code and the logic to write one but we don't need to spend an eternity to keep up with all the updates and rewriting the already written codes so we need someone else to speed up that process for us to make our ideas reality without the extra effort that could now be avoided with ai all we need to do is fix and polish the errors in the code, hear it's suggestions for the work plans and improve them because honestly ai is still not that smart to figure out everything on its own and by then we be living the boss life with ai being the wage-slave that we don't even need to pay.