Cooking shows are a perfect analogy for this stuff. For some reason I never connected the highly-edited-mass-appeal "watch someone do skilled work" videos on YouTube with Food Network style content until just now, but you're right they're totally scratching the same basic itch. They make people feel like they're learning something just by watching, while there is really no substitute for actually just doing the thing.
And the sad/crazy thing is that AI assisted coding/refactoring does seem to stray substantially over the line of observation vs participation to the point that the experience is largely defined by "learning by watching"
:/
Prompt engineering (to the extent that it results in the difference between applied LLM success vs failure) requires the human to truly grok what they're getting help on - the current top comment notes that the model applied more or less exactly the same diff they would have done, based on deep understanding of the exact codebase being modified - and also have some level of intuition about how LLMs work.
Someone just treating the model and context like an obscure TV remote and pressing all the buttons to see what they do, will get a result, and it might seem interesting, but will it be ontologically correct? Good question!
