> AI has changed nothing in terms of learning to program

In terms of what you should be doing when you learn to program, I fully agree.

In terms of the effects AI has on the activity of learning to program, I think it has: it has made it very tempting (and affordable - so far) to just make the AI build and even adapt the simple stuff for you that you'd otherwise be building and adapting by yourself. I suppose it can even give you the false feeling you understand the stuff it has built for you by reading the generated code. But this makes you never go through the critical learning steps (trial and error, hard thinking about the thing, notice what you are missing, etc).

We already had the possibility to run web searches and copy paste publicly available stuff, but I think that this came with more friction, and the automated adaptation aspect was not there, you've had to do it by yourself. I think Gen AI has made it way easier to be lazy in the learning and it's a trap.

But from the rest of your comment it seems we mostly agree.