This is a good quote, but it lives within a context of professional code development.

Everyone in the modern era starts coding by copying functions without understanding what it does, and people go entire careers in all sorts of jobs and industries without understanding things by copying what came before that ‘worked’ without really understanding the underlying mechanisms.

What’s important is having a willingness to learn and putting in the effort to learn. AI code snippets are super useful for learning even when it hallucinates if you test it and make backups first. This all requires responsible IT practices to do safely in a production environment, and thats where corporate management eyeing labor cost reduction loses the plot, thinking AI is a wholesale replacement for a competent human as the tech currently stands.