Programming is the most automated career in history. Punch cards, Assembler, Compilers, Linkers, Keyboards, Garbage Collection, Type Checkers, Subroutines and Functions, Classes, Macros, Libraries (of increasingly higher-level abstractions), Build Scripts, CI/CD - those are all automation concepts that do things that theoretically a programmer could have done manually. To build all the software we build now would theoretically be possible without any automation - but it would probably require far more programmers than there are people on earth. However, because better tech leads to people doing more with the same, in practice the number of programmers has grown with time as we’ve just built more complex software.