>letting the AI just generate it while I prompt

But isn't prompting and iterating another way of instructing the computer to do what you want? Perhaps we could view it as a step up in the level of abstraction we work at.

We had similar arguments when high-level languages were introduced. Experienced programmers of that era maintained that they could write better programs in assembly language than in COBOL/FORTRAN/PL-I/Pascal etc. Yet even today we still need core portions of code written in assembler, but not much.