Attitude as old as time itself.
Your analogy is bad. The programmer and the AI both produce working code. The other poster's response was correct.
Also software was always about domain knowledge and formal reasoning. Coding is just notation. Someone may like paper and pen, and someone may like a typewriter, but ultimately it’s the writing that matters. Correctness of a program does not depends on the language (and the cpu only manipulate electric flow).
I argue against AI because most of its users don’t care about the correctness of their code. They just want to produce lots of it (the resurgence of the flawed LoC metric as a badge of honor).
This is remarkably sloppy for someone who codes. No facts, just opinion, claimed with confidence.
Strong opinions, loosely held.
What I’ve seen seems to confirm that opinion, so I’m still holding on to it.
Yes doctor, but enough about my stool.
Most programmers didn't have access to anything so fancy as those, in fact most programmers considered access to a C compiler to be an extravagant flex well into the 80s. By the 90s they were well available and you had a new generation of programmers that started out with C, encountering older programmers who started out writing assembly for their z80s, the latter of whole were constantly sneering at kids going soft.
Starting when I was about 10, I learned BASIC (not a real language, I was constantly told), z80, then C (a "high level" language) for the m68k. I encountered all of the attitudes I know see ITT being thrown at programmers using coding agents. Hell, I would bet money on some of those exact same old farts still lurking IRC channels, occasionally waking up like Rip Van Winkle to grumble about kids taking old ubiquitous technology for granted now.
(Yes, one can write C programs with undefined behavior, but C does also have many well-defined properties which allow people to reason about well-defined C programs logically reliably.)
Really, your attitude is not new. Including even your "this is why it's different this time", its just a mirror reflecting the past.
From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
Since the dice is loaded heavily, this happens quite often. This makes people think that the dice can program.
I'm not a purist on a mountaintop saying tools can't be used effectively during coding. Everyone googles for API parameters, you can just ask ChatGPT how to fix syntax in an unfamiliar language, and you can copy anything you have access to and paste it in, that's all okay. It just isn't what makes you a coder any more than wearing a uniform makes you a cop.
But I think people object to you saying LLMs are not coding. Using them certainly does not help the person using them think the same way making all the decisions while writing the code. But even if LLMs are a Chinese room, if they could produce the same output as a human (given the same goal and information context), they IMO would be coding.