> to start with a blank canvas and create something that others will value

AI is much faster at taking an idea and creating a working proof of concept than any human I've seen.

Not saying it's good engineering, but leave that to the gardeners.

The right metaphor isn't painting, though, it's molding clay. That first pass is slop, but it's raw clay that the agent is very good at molding given a modicum of direction and "not this, do that" comments. The combined first-pass and reshaping time is still far less than writing by hand from scratch. And increasingly, that first pass is ... not bad?

Not all code is fixable. Sometimes the best thing to do with code is to throw it away.

Without any human code to grab on to, AI has a habit of writing code that is pervasively low quality and rife with misunderstandings such that it always needs to be thrown out.

And yes with considerable prompting effort you can improve this picture. But it's easier, faster and cheaper to just write the code yourself. Code is the best specification language we have.