It's interesting to see how most of the discussion on the 'program that can write programs' was approaching it from a very traditional-AI point of view - how do we define the problem space, how do we make programming languages more amenable to it, etc. basically just envisioning a more sophisticated version of a traditional code generator. Nobody really foresaw that we would have a general intelligence that can write programs effortlessly by just dumping the entire internet into a simple algorithm.