I guess it depends on what you think prompts look like. If it’s “Claude, write GTA, make no mistakes” then yeah that’s probably never going to be programming. It’s also not what prompting looks like that produces these results that make people like the author see a gap. Although personally I think a big part of the gap is the automatic verification coding agents can do and that’s impossible in many other areas.

As someone who barely (i.e. not professionally yet) wrote assembly almost 40 years ago, structured languages were well accepted by that time, but compilers were legitimately not that good at optimization, so much like today, we did have to do things by hand instead of using a compiler if we wanted good results. That compilers got better at this than humans in most cases is a somewhat recent thing. Personally I’m too young to have ever thought of structured languages as “not real programming”, but I know people who definitely did think that. The other thing that wasn’t considered real programming is scripting languages. The perception of those changed dramatically in my lifetime.

One argument I see often is that even though a modern structured language’s compiler does generate a ton of code from a small amount of input, at least you know exactly what that input does. Which is funny to me because for the last 20 years I’ve been complaining that people don’t understand what the machine does when it runs their code does anymore, because how are they supposed to learn that when they started on Java or similar.