"I do not doubt that one day humans will no longer type out code line by line, but who has done that in the last few years anyway?"
Umm, me, and every other person I work with who has any sort of responsibility for writing code. That's not to say that *every* line of code we add to our respective projects has been handwritten by us, but the majority of it certainly will have been.
Because if you know what you're doing, then by the time you've either found a suitable third-party donor to copy-paste from (after having checked the licencing requirements to make sure you're not about to open yourself/your employer up to a potentially costly mistake), or you've coaxed an AI agent into spewing forth something that looks halfway acceptable, you'll have been able to just write the bloody code yourself and already be onto the next thing to be done... *Blindly* copy-pasting (whether from a human curated source such as SO, or from an AI console) is never the right answer - at the very least you need to be able to understand the code you're pasting - so if that's all you're capable of doing then here's your coat, there's the door, I'd like to say it's been a pleasure working with you but I fear that might be less than entirely truthful. And whilst I work in a part of the world where employees generally have somewhat more protection against sudden job loss, the overall sentiment remains true - if the only reason you're capable of doing the job you were hired to do is because you're reliant on copying other peoples work in some way, then sooner or later you will be heading for the door.
Pilots are still expected to maintain hands-on currency in flying whichever aircraft types they're certified to fly, even if 99% of the time they're sitting back and letting the automated systems handle the everyday tasks of getting from A to B, because when, not if, things take a turn for the worse, you WANT your human in the loop to have the necessary abilities to at least be in with a fighting chance of resolving the problem. And the same should be true for every other job, no matter whether it's a safety critical role or not, otherwise what's the point of having a human in the loop in the first place?
So yes, I damn well DO expect every engineer I work with in the software development side of things not only to be able to write code by hand, but to actually DO SO on a regular basis. Otherwise they're letting their abilities turn stale, and that's the last thing I want in my team when, not if, a problem NEEDS human attention. Especially since, as the most senior engineer on the team, any such problem will almost always end up being dropped into my lap if no-one else is able to figure it out first, and I've got more than enough other work to be getting on with, so I'd prefer that the rest of the team retains enough currency to be able to deal with most such problems themselves, and I'd *very much* prefer they retain enough currency such that they don't cause such problems to arise in the first place...
