It is sad. I like programming, if I couldn't do it and had to write text (which I do hate, I'm not a writer) it would be make quite a sad world.

A pattern I've settled into is to write code but leave a TODO for every narrow thing I want the LLM to do for me. Then just tell the agent to fix the todos. It's often faster and easier to give "instructions" this way

Of course you can always program by hand, no one is stopping you.

Not sure this is true for all of us. I bet many/some (unsure here) are told to use ai for their daily programming tasks.

Plenty of companies are forcing the use of AI to people.