You're correct that writing code by hand has been heavily displaced by AI programming, but understanding how things work isn't really an "antiquated hobby" and this mentality causes a lot of people to incorrectly assume that latent knowledge of how to program is no longer useful.

It's still pretty undisputed that if you know how to write code, you can generate better AI code than someone who doesn't, and do it with less tokens. I think it's more like in university where in other engineering disciplines you learn the math and underlying concepts and are forced to do them by hand. This gives you an understanding of what you're doing, but in the real world you, ya know, just plug that stuff into matlab.