Programming, in one word: abstraction.
1945 - ENIAC. You arranged the bits yourself. 30 tons, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 3,000 switches, patch cables.
Early 1950s - Assembly. ADD, MOV, JMP. Still one instruction per machine instruction, but readable.
1957 - FORTRAN on the IBM 704. You wrote algebra. The compiler arranged the bits.
1972 - C on the PDP-11. Same source, different machines. Software escapes the hardware.
1974 - SQL. You described the result. The database planned the steps.
1995 - JavaScript. Ten days of work becomes the language of the web.
Mid-90s - IDEs. The write-compile-debug loop shrinks from minutes to seconds.
2022 - Chat-to-code. You describe intent in English. A model writes the code.
2026 - Agentic coding. You direct the agent. The agent writes the code that the compiler turns into bits.
Every leap moved the human one layer further from the machine. Every leap was dismissed as a toy by the people doing it the old way. The layer they’re standing on was once that toy.