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SQLite's Creator Answers the AI Jobs Question With SQL: 'That Didn't Mean Programmers Went Away. It Just Meant the Job Changed a Little Bit'
D. Richard Hipp, who wrote SQLite, offered a historical analogy on July 29 that cuts through most AI-displacement discourse: before SQL there were people whose entire job was generating software to query large data sets, and their job title was COBOL programmer. SQL did not eliminate the programmer; it moved the work up a level. Coming from someone who has maintained one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on earth for over two decades, it is a more grounded prior than either the acceleration or the extinction narrative — and it implies the thing to watch is which layer of the job is being abstracted, not whether the headcount survives.
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