It really is big. From baby's first prompting on big corpo model learning how tokens work, to setting up your own environment to run models locally (Because hey, not everyone knows how to use git), to soft prompting, to training your own weights.

Nobody is realistically writing fundamental models unless they work with Google or whatever though.

If you want to disabuse yourself of the notion that AI is close to replacing programmers for anything but the most mundane and trivial tasks, try to have GPT 4 generate a novel implementation of moderate complexity and watch it import mystery libraries that do exactly what you want the code to do, but that don't actually exist.

Yeah, you can do a lot without writing a single line of code. You can certainly interact with the models because others who can have already done the leg work. But someone still has to do it.