in the 1920's.

When I first started programming it was with COBOL on IBM mainframes.

Your source code was a deck of punched cards that needed to be in the correct sequence. In order to compile your program you would fill out a job submission form and give that to the operations people who would run the batch job to compile it and eventually you would receive a printout of the results.

The jump to an interactive editor (ISPF) changed this to something that could be done exponentially easier and faster, not to mention a much better way to store source code.

At the end of my career I was using Visual Studio that offered IntelliSense which provides options to choose code snippets to insert for you and information about objects when hovering which were great improvements.

I retired in 2019 and have been away from it since then. I recently downloaded the Community version of Visual Studio to do some development for fun and mental exercises.

It has AI built into it with CoPilot. Essentially you don't need to know how to code, it will tell you. If you don't understand existing code? Don't worry, it will tell you what its' doing.

It's some amazing stuff, but also extremely scary from a knowledge standpoint.

After seeing the progress from file based systems to databases and all of the magic bullets (CASE Tools, 4GL, SCRUM, etc.) the thing that made the difference between good solutions and overly complex ones was understanding the problem. Now they don't want you to understand the solution.