Except that code is generally made of… other code. And generally gets transformed from some kind of source form to some kind of deployment form. And then executed by some kind of runtime, made of code. On some kind of OS, made of code.

The level of abstraction at which you make paper by hand is pretty much constant. The level of abstraction at which you make even a “hello world” program by hand is extremely flexible.

Depending on your operating environment, even an incredibly complex and impressive task may just be a matter of passing the right flag to a CLI tool that you already use.

Being attentive to the manual experience of how a codebase “feels” is pretty important for making sure a system has a coherent (read: not over-engineered) approach to bridging the high and low levels of the tasks it performs.

Not paying attention to that, because you can delegate it to a chatbot, is kind of like forgoing having light switches in a room because you can just keep a crane parked outside and have it slam a lighting fixture through the ceiling when you need it and then dump a mound of dirt to cover the hole when you don’t need it.

Like, that functions and accomplishes the task in a pinch, but you do not want to try occupying that room in person at any point to do any kind of detail work.