Your acquaintances aren't changing their minds because the arguments are weak. Both the article and your comment assume that the only mode of interaction for natural language is a very high level description of programmer intent.
You can interact with AI and say "code me a calculator" or "now declare a array of booleans to map to each of the keys in the UI and set the corresponding array position to true when the key is pressed".
These commands are written in natural language at such different levels of abstraction that is hard to put them in the same bucket. It would be fair to call the latter an imperative language with the LLM in the role of a compiler. That's very similar to how I use AI.
If AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you". And you can even ask them to do it at different levels of abstraction!
>If AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you"
That would just be the "I" part, since was missing the A for artificial: you asked a naturally made person.
And yes, nobody argued that they didn't have I in 1978, so I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to prove.
It's the same as "natural language bricklaying" where you make walls appear by speaking instructions to a brickie whom you're paying.
The latter is also very far from specifying a calculator. And based on what we see in the "Show HN" projects, also very far from what the average person process is of using AI for generating software.