I'm pretty sure following a recipe is generally considered cooking.

Isn't following a recipe to make food exactly the definition of cooking? Maybe they meant that a chef has to invent original dishes but I think the whole cooking metaphor fails to map to programming since its mass production vs programming being essentially always custom one off.

If I dictated every ascii character of Romeo and Juliet to you, would you then call yourself a playwright?

I would call you a good typist.

EDIT: I never cook with a recipe and do everything by taste, feel, and instinct.

Then you should have used Romeo and Juliet example instead of cooking example.

Following receipt is in fact cooking. You can go by feel, but you don't have to. Majority of cooking is following receipt, whether written or not.

what happens when you burn the food because you have no concept of how hot is too hot?

what happens when you get a null pointer because you have no concept of exception handling?

Did the recipe say "burn the food"?

Ok, then you didn't follow it.

"Did the programming tutorial say 'watch out for flipped bits in your hello world'"

What happens is you learn, and next time you have a concept. That doesn't mean you stopped using recipes.

This is literally how some of my coding friends told me they learned to code and created their own programs.

And yes following a recipe is cooking otherwise chefs would never do it, it’s called standardization

Literally all programming fits that sentence. Your language is an abstraction, the opcodes it compiles to are an abstraction, the machine code is an abstraction and the microcode it translates to - also. The engineering software for hardware is a highly simplified abstraction based upon physics and math. The physics and math, ...an abstraction for reality we barely understand.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

But maybe you create your own universe from scratch and program it without abstraction, who knows.

"A submarine propelling itself through water? Pfft, that's not swimming."

It's strictly not. Marine soldiers are not asked to pass a submarine piloting test, they're asked to complete a swimming test.

Why is this important? Because how can one import a library for a problem that currently has no solution?

It's a reference.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Dijkstra

A computer "follows the recipe", the programmer writes it. Sometimes the programmer runs parts of the program in his head.

A chef creates recipes and sometimes follows them. He can also extemporise.

Of course it is. You don't write a new web framework when you want to build a website.

which framework do i use to translate my cool idea for a game into a triple aaa title, merely through speech alone?