The C64 wasn't as good a BASIC environment. You can overwrite text in a program listing and press ENTER to update a line, which can copy a line if you can squeeze in a new number.
Neither were as good as Acorn's BASIC.
For a couple of years in secondary school, my alarm was a program I wrote every night on my CPC 464. My tape drive was broken, so I had to type every program in fresh. If I wanted to wake up in the morning, I'd write a nested loop over the hours and minutes and start playing sound.
It explains some basic concepts beautifully, far better than I can.
I think all the “kids these days” gripes only apply to people’s first few years. You can argue they’re formative, but most professional programmers will quickly need to evolve beyond “take message literally, ask online for help, paste error message into google/SO” to be good at their jobs. I don’t know anybody beyond entry level who operates like that.
I rarely take things literally like you said (though I may start by giving it the benefit of the doubt), I always just check the actual code from the thing emitting the error message, read the source of libraries I’m using, seek out documentation. It just so happens I can do all of that from my computer rather than doing some of it with a book.
I haven't worked with a lot of people like that, but enough to guess that there is quite a bit of people who work that way.
But it's true that after a point, the only errors left are the ones that can only be resolved by reading the documentation and experience (only 4 DELETE per hour, and you throw me an undocumented 503 error? Really?), and llm can't really do it for you.
Interesting, because to me there still seem to be many public discussion forum questions where the answer is "Have you tried doing exactly what the error message is telling you?"
One of my cousins learnt to program as a teenager in Argentina, before the web. He told me about the difficulty of finding programming information over there. Apparently, people who knew any kind of programming had paid dearly to get that knowledge and in turned charged others for that knowledge. Needless to say, there were not many programmers in the country at the time.
In comparison, today's generation has access to vast libraries of knowledge.
As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/paste. You had to type every listing in to get it running, as well as find that semi-colon you forgot on line 16,46,102 of 200. Then you had to remember everything, take notes, and literally research answers. You couldn’t just ask a random person on the internet, at least for a few years after I learned how to program when online forums became a thing.
One big difference I can think of between my younger peers and myself: When I see an error message, I take it as a “hint that something is wrong” where my younger peers tend to take error messages literally. Probably because I “grew up” with terrible error messages that hardly ever pointed to the actual file/line the error was on.