At the other end of the spectrum, I have never written a line of assembly code, much less used a punch card.

Yes. I don't know what magical world you live in, but the code generated by Claud Opus/Fable is better quality than the output of junior devs with 4 to 5 years of experience and even supersede many of the devs with 10+ years of experience. This is just my experience with the current company I work at.

With clear guidance, specs, context it will do a better job including accounting for many types of edge cases and interactions than most developers.

That's not the point though. Why do AI boosters keep moaning about how "AI is already is will be better than everyone in field X in Y months" continuously for _years_? Don't you see the incongruence in claiming that continuously over long periods of time?

Why aren't we there yet?