>All it got from that was an appreciation for syntax and language idiom;

Sounds like it's you who is behind the times. With things like REA we know that LLMs can reverse engineer the behaviour of binaries and basically treat them as a form of specification to rebuild an application.

This means that old python interpreter acts like a specification for what kind of features must be included inside the project.

LLMs are amazing at input to output transformations and that hasn't changed at all.

I think it's you who has to update his mental model away from "stochastic parrot era" accusations.

PS: if you're trying to accuse me of being a "stochastic parroter", that's exactly what I mean.

Taking an input and transforming it to an output is the exact opposite of repeating something.