> I'd be very curious to hear about how people are overcoming this sort of cognitive dissonance.

It’s not difficult:

Drafting AI-assisted programming of computers is fine.

Drafting AI-assisted communications to other humans is not fine.

If your program is written for the express purpose of communicating a specific written message then the message itself must not be AI-assisted but, here anyways, it’s fine if the executable code is AI-assisted. If your personal views conflate those two points, then you’ll have difficulty coping with the distinction here, and may end up exiting HN if you’re unable to coexist with the cognitive dissonance that separation creates.

> It takes extreme mental gymnastics to consider coding […] to not be a form of writing

It does not: coding is generally a form of writing whose primary audience is non-humans. That other humans may read your code and appreciate it is not related to its primary purpose: to direct the operation of a technological device in a programmatic way. Separately, the primary purpose of human-to-human communications is to convey something from your mind to another’s; the mechanism by which that occurs is secondary and has largely shown to be swappable across all possible substrates that can support communication.

So, then: if your marriage proposal to an imagined lover were in the form of code as poetry, it would be offensive to post that here if you wrote the poem with AI — and since the primary purpose of such a program is human-to-human taking precedence over human-to-machine, that’s an obvious case where AI assistance is unwelcome.

Yes, one can adopt a definition of ‘language’ that incorporates both English and Perl into one bucket; but the poem point still applies. Regardless of what dialect your writing is in, if the foremost audience of the written words is humans, then AI-assisted writing isn’t welcome here.

If you’re unable to judge whether code is foremost intended for a computer or for a human, then that’s an area where you’ll need to invest much more consideration if you wish to adhere to the guidelines.

> which is universally an act of producing text

Brainfuck is not in any way classifiable as ‘text’, nor is Renesas SH-2A assembly code. It may be possible to represent them in an ASCII file, but they are not interpretable through human linguistic processes. TIS-100 programs are representable as ASCII text, but without their shape and structure in a 4x3 visual grid, lose all cohesion and functionality. People who program music synthesizers using knobs and wires aren’t writing text, but are creating communications for a human audience, which is why the outcome (AI-assisted music) is disgusting while the process (AI-assisted synthesizer implementation) would not be. And so on, et cetera.