This is definitely a very cool tech demo, but I got the same feeling reading this as I do when I read a blog post years ago where a guy walked through using very rigid green-red-green TDD to solve a hairy algorithmic problem[0]: it sort of seems like the person already had the shape of the solution in their head before they started writing the code.
Which is maybe the point! As the article points out, remembering the correct incantation to get matplotlib to spit out a bar chart is hard[1]; I certainly have to look it up literally every time (well, these days, I just use tools which have more intuitive APIs, but that's maybe besides the point). I don't really know what it means to "binarize" a dataset, but apparently the language model did, and apparently seeing the giant stack trace when trying to plot a precision-recall curve was enough to prompt the article writer to realize such an operation might be useful. When you're doing exploratory analysis like this, keeping a train of thought going is extremely important, so avoiding paging back and forth to the scikit-learn documentation is obviously a huge win.
But, on the other hand, this isn't a "no-code" solution in any real sense, because for all intents and purposes the author really did all the difficult parts which would've been necessary for a "fully coded" solution: they knew the technical outcome they wanted and had very good domain knowledge to guide the solution, and, shoot, they still ended up needing to understand semantics of the programming language and abstractions they were working with in that stacktrace at the end. It's still extremely neat (and, presumably, useful) to see the computer was able to correctly guess at all the syntax and API interfaces for the most part[2], but I don't really think you can fault people for wanting to push back against the idea that this is somehow fundamentally transformative, since I think it's pretty obvious that the human is (still) doing the hard and interesting parts and the computer is (still) doing the tedious and boring parts. Maybe people shouldn't be getting flustered about a click-baity title over-promising a hip new technology, but as you say:
> Or is it just years and years of people getting burned by previous "AI" projects without knowing that this one is actually rather impressive and comes from good research?
There's definitely some of this.
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[0] I wish I could find the link for this, but I'm very bad at google these days.
[1] To risk ascribing agency to a statistical model of github commits, it is sort of funny that the co-pilot pulled in seaborn as a dependency but then did everything directly with calls to plt and DataFrame.plot.
[2] I don't really have the expertise myself to tell you whether that scikit pipeline is at all reasonable, I suppose. It sure sounds fancy, though.