“Feels primitive,” is holding up a lot of assumptions.

What feels primitive to me is how we approach programming in industry as a process of trial and error rather than one of rigour.

These are tools that automate copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and GitHub, running tools, and generating a ton of noise to sift through. They hallucinate code, documentation, and various other artifacts that are sometimes useful and are occasionally complete BS.

Some people find that they can make useful tools out of these things. Great.

A real programmer is still a human.

Update: nothing wrong with trial and error as a process. I use it a lot. But there are lots of places where we use this method that seem inappropriate and sometimes even dangerous. Yet it’s the most common tool we have and everything starts to look like a nail.