"Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"
This was literally part of the premise of The Jetsons. George's job was to press a single button while the computer RUDI did all the work.
The difference is, Jetsons wasn't a dystopia (unlike the current timeline), so when Mr. Spacely fired George, RUDI would take his side and refuse to work until George was re-hired.
> "Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"
Grumpy old man: "That's exactly why our generation was so much smarter than today's whippersnappers: we were thinking from morning to night the whole long day."
I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.
I was being a little facetious, but there are things that most people would find tedious today that we would put up with in the past. Writing anything long by hand (letters, essays), doing accounting without a spreadsheet, writing a game in only assembly language, using punch cards, typesetting newspapers and books manually...
"Can you believe that Dad actually used to have to go into an office and type code all day long, MAUALLY??! Line by line, with no advice from AI, he had to think all by himself!"