It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
> I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems.
Is this not also "orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference"?
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.