[sapphireblue]

Isn't doing programming projects much less cumbersome when you hire a professional programmer and express a high-level project spec to him/her? Why cannot a sufficiently advanced machine-learning model behave just like such a professional?

Modern models learn to achieve goals in increasingly sophisticated 3d environments and even learn execute commands in some very limited form of natural language. You could say that the question of achieving more humanlike performance may be "just" a question of engineering and scale.