> I can confidently state that this is not true for the VAST majority of programmers and software engineers.

That may well be true. I think it's even more true in cases where the user is not a programmer by profession. I once watched someone present their graduate-level research in a different field and explain how they had solved a real-world problem in their field by writing a complicated computer program full of complicated heuristics to get it to run fast enough and thinking "hmm, I'm pretty sure that a standard algorithm from computer graphics could be adapted to directly solve your problem in O(n log n) time".

If users can get usable algorithms that approximately match the state of the art out of a chatbot (or a fancy "agent") without needing to know the magic words, then that would be amazing, regardless of whether those chatbots/agents ever become creative enough to actually advance the state of the art.

(I sometimes dream of an AI producing a piece of actual code that comes even close to state of the art for solving mixed-integer optimization problems. That's a whole field of wonderful computer science / math that is mostly usable via a couple of extraordinarily expensive closed-source offerings.)