What worries me is you need that time in the dirt to get a feel for coding as a craft. And at least for me that aspect of knowing the craft helps get my thinking in tune with problem solving in a very productive way.

Coding can be similar to playing an instrument, if you have mastery, it can help you be more expressive with the ideas you already have and lead you to new ones.

Whereas if we take away the craft of coding I think you end up with the type of code academic labs produce: something that purely starts on a “drawing board”, is given to the grad student/intern/LLM to make work, and while it will prove the concept it won’t scale into long term, as the intern doesn’t know when to spend an extra 30 minutes in a function so that it may be more flexible down the road.