At the moment it almost feels like automation is getting further away not closer. It feels like there is too much focus on the stack i.e. people seem to enjoy layering frameworks on top of libraries on top of other frameworks. That leads toplication and moving targets so it hard to know what is automatable and what isn. In a previous job we were in the business of automating things for large banks and we did it quite well. It seems now that the industry is actually regressing away from systems that can really be automated. Too much focus on the web assumes human interaction important services like WhatsApp don have real APIs. I think if were going to get real automation in programming we need to step back to simpler building blocks get rid of all the frameworks which don really seem to do anything. Something like Smalltalk and particularly the Smalltalk VM seem ideal for this. It introspective and runs live i.e. you make changes to running systems. This I think provides an opportunity to make systems which can respond to changing requests and even automate a certain level of responding to those requests. I remember an answer by Alan Kay here on Quora suggesting an interesting idea that every object could have an URL. So a Smalltalk VM could somehow investigate the of request formulate a solution to the request and issue an URL for the service it provides. As it stands I think most of the industry is far too excited about addingplications which really don need to exist. Take Flask for Python I recently replaced a Flask project with a simpler Go service and for the life of me I really don know what problem Flask is supposed to be solving. I think if were really going to make progress in automating programming we need to cut right back to What Is Actually Needed (another Alan Kay-ism). Throw away all the stuff we don need and actually address the problem without theplications of Stacks frameworks and libraries we don need.