> That's qualitatively different from the compilers I have used.
Is it? I can, in most traditional programming languages commonly used to today, using decades old compiler technology, say something like "x = [1,2,3]" and it will, for example, systematically generate all the code necessary to allocate memory without any need for me to be any more explicit about it. It would be fair to say AI offers an even higher level abstraction, like how most programming languages used today are a higher level abstraction over assembly, but fundamentally different it is not.
"generate a c program that uses gcc 128 bit floats and systematically generates all quadratic roots in order of the max size of their minimal polynomial coefficients, and then sort them and calculate the distribution of the intervals between adjacent numbers" is just code. You still have to write the code get AI to translate it into a lower-level abstraction. It doesn't magically go off and do its own autonomous thing.