We Can't Code Anymore. AI Won't. What Then?

I've been in IT for 30 years, 20 of them as a developer. The more I hear people say there's no need to learn programming anymore, the more this keeps nagging at me. It didn't take long into the vibe coding era before tech leaders and other influential voices in tech and business started telling young people exactly that. At first I thought it was just sad, that fewer people would get to experience the joy of making something themselves. But that wasn't the real reason it stuck with me. A couple of weeks ago it hit me, what if almost no one can code and AI refuses. What happens then? No Way! That wouldn't happen you might say. Maybe not tomorrow. But in a decade or two? If we put AI to the side for a moment, there is already a real-world example that shows this is possible, the COBOL problem. Almost no one learns COBOL and few have for a very long time. At the same time the people with that knowledge are disappearing. But the systems are still there, with fewer and fewer people able to