I don’t want to be that person, but if you can think of a decent API for your MFC-style wrapper, an AI should be able to write a decent implementation for you.

Agreed. In fact this supports the GPs point about using the rawest form of GUI manipulation.

For years we loaded up libraries and abstractions to minimize boilerplate. These hid the actual underlying mechanisms and often made specific customisations harder to do since you were taken away from the raw functionality.

These days AI is extremely good at writing boilerplate and in my opinion explicitly typed out boilerplate code is much easier to reason about than a library that abstracts things away to a one line annotation or similar.

A good example is that i've recently been leaning back to the raw Android apis for things like recyclerviews etc. It used to be 10+ files to changed to create an efficient scrolling view on Android with various resources and adapters required. So a whole bunch of libraries came out to try to abstract the complexity away. You know what though? I don't care about that anymore. I'm going back to the raw GUI APIs where possible because it's so explicit and clear even if it's 10x more code.