Re:4 architects, 10 developers, 40 programmers (Score 1)

That's not the idea. Our vision is not of programmers working as mindless drones driven by others. It's of programmers building tools that make their lives easier.

Why use a compiler? Because it handles a lot of uninteresting details. I used to write those details by hand, writing applications in assembly language. I really appreciate having a tool that does it for me.

Why not take the same idea farther, or do you think we have reached the zenith of automation in programming?

I don't think we've reached it yet. We can identify many recurring problems and good solutions for them, and we can write them down as patterns. The next step is to bake some of those patterns into frameworks. From there, we can build tools that make it fast and easy to instantiate, configure and assemble components based on the framework.

Don't believe me? How do you build UIs? By hand or using a tool?

Software Factories are the same idea, just tackling more of the problem space. UIs are well enough understood and well enough automated. Let's work on some of the problems that haven't been solved to that degree.