Does anyone know where there are good discussions about what programmers should focus on in a world where a technical artist can make games without programmers?
Their art skills
Unfortunately, that's close to the truth
There's an endless supply of pretty good indie coders out there, but a relatively small amount of equivalently skilled artists, especially when you subtract those (the majority) that are unwilling to take risks (e.g. profit sharing) and only want safe money-up-front work. For many indies, the only option is to do your own art.
For coders, making games is the most enjoyable thing you can do with your coding skills. But for artists, there's often other things that they can enjoy equally if not more - maybe just creating 'art for arts sake', rather than game assets.
Coding is getting easier every day, art isn't. Professional art tools are still prohibitively expensive (especially for 3D), whereas plenty of powerful coding tools are free or relatively inexpensive.
Yes, the 'faux retro' indie style works very well for some, and when done well it looks great, but it's less appealing when everyone's trying to do the lo-fi pixel art thing (often badly/inconsistently!)
But there's always the option of designing code-heavy/content-light games. Anything with procedural generation, or user-created content as a key feature - Minecraft being an obvious example. (Just don't start another Minecraft-a-like, there's already over 9000 of them out there...)
And even in games that a technical artist could create - well, they could nearly always be done better with an experienced coder helping out. Whether it's to deal with tricky collision/physics issues, write AI/pathfinding code, or just to optimize it and get it running at 60fps - For anything game-specific and needing non-trivial algorithms, there'll always be code to write.
Developer
