No, the point is that a general-ish ability to draw good SVGs is a useful ability in itself. People need SVGs for all sorts of purposes, and if AI can generate one for them, that's mostly useful (discussions about art and employment etc notwithstanding).
That said, I think this would correlate relatively little with general programming ability. They're not unrelated, of course, but being able to generate code that paints an accurate + esthetically pleasing image is quite different from generating code that achieves a non-spatial goal.
Yeah, if you want to generate an aesthetically pleasing SVG, you'd be better off asking a pixel-based image-generation model for "vector art" and then deconstructing it into an equivalent SVG with something like LayerPeeler. https://layerpeeler.github.io/
These are rectangles with some fill and strokes, textboxes lines and arrows. If the text has already been written, and the author has a clear idea of the flow all it takes are some a dozen or so points and click, and setting a couple of fills, then copy pastes, and finally some resizes, selects and moves.
This design is trivial. I admit it would be hard to achieve in Word (or at least for me because I don’t know how to make a diagram in Word any more) but Figma and Inkascape are made to do these things, and have optimized UI for that (personally I would have just used mermaid though).
I think you may have lost your faith in human capabilities just a little bit if you think drawing stuff like this takes any time or effort at all. Compared to designing and architecturing the system, drawing the diagram is trivial. Now I know that my parent did neither but it seems like they vibe-coded the whole thing. I’m sure they will end up with a fun little toy from the whole endeavor they can play with for 2 weeks before abandoning. Maybe the author will even feel bad about the carbon footprint of this whole exercise and buy some carbon offsets to make up for it.
Agree directionally - even back in sonnet 3.5 days, I was helping some friends by showing them how to create intermediate representations for SVG building blocks mapping to parametrizable functions that can be used to make interactive SVG-rendered visualizations for various medical needs.
That said, I think this would correlate relatively little with general programming ability. They're not unrelated, of course, but being able to generate code that paints an accurate + esthetically pleasing image is quite different from generating code that achieves a non-spatial goal.