I agree mostly with your metaphor, I think perhaps I disagree slightly on how it's applied. You don't need to create your own tools to create art, but I don't necessarily map the "tools" to code. The act of programming is mapping information to hardware, the value is in the information, and using LLM's to bypass the phase where you obtain, synthesise, and extend that information is the part where you lose the benefits of iteration. If you're just using the LLM as a mechanical tool to output code, it's mostly not different from, say, using speech-to-text to output code. When you start hearing things like "I don't care about the quality of the code, just it's outputs" that starts sounding like someone isn't iterating on the information which is the crucial bit.