I've been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.
Lately, I have been using ChatGPT and the OpenAI API to do exactly that for a few projects. I used it to help me round out the design, brainstorm about approaches, tune database requirements, etc. I basically got to the point where I had a proof of concept for all the separate components in a very short amount of time. Then for the implementation it was a similar story. I already had a much more solid idea (technical and functional design, if you will) of how I wanted to implement things than I normally do. And, for most of the things where I would get slowed down normally, I could just turn to the chat. Then by just telling it what part I had trouble with, it would get me back on track in no time.
Having said all that, I couldn't have used it in such a way without any knowledge of programming. Because if you just tell it that you want to "create an application that does X" it will come up with overly broad solution. All the questions and problems I presented to it were based from a position where I already knew the language, platform and had a general sense of requirements.
Why make something that produces low level code based off of existing low level code instead of building up meaningful abstractions to make development easier and ensure that low level code was written right?
Basically react and other similar abstractions for other languages did more to take "coding" out of creating applications than gpt ever will IMO.
The core of what we do never changes - get input from user, show error, get input again, save the input, show the input.
Now it just got more complicated, even though 20 years later most of this could be a dull Rails or a Django app.
And AI will probably do the decent CRUD part, but you will still need an expert for the hard parts of software.
But my favourite bit is refining and optimising the code!
Finding the patterns and abstractions I can make to DRY it out.
That's the bit I like :-)
Wrestling APIs and trying to understand inadequate documentation is the worst part!
There were probably a lot of loom weavers that felt the same about their tools. But the times, they are a-changing.