The entire history of software engineering can be viewed as a steady march toward higher levels of abstraction. Just as the invention of compilers didn't eliminate the need to think programmatically but rather elevated our work to a higher level of abstraction, AI assistants represent the next step in this continual progression. The key difference is that instead of learning a formal programming language, users are learning how to express computational intent through natural language with sufficient precision to generate working code. AI isn't eliminating programming; it's providing a new, more abstract interface to the same underlying process of instructing computers to perform specific tasks.