More to the point, in any programming language the API is just a way of exposing deterministic logic and building reliable structures. In other words, there is an expected, verifiable output for any given input that you're looking to attain with 100% reproducibility.
Even copy/pasting regex rules as "incantations" is more like programming than devising prompts is. The regex can be tested and won't give a different output each time it's used.
I was at a bar the other night and heard a woman in her fifties talking about how her husband tries to use GPT for everything now. They were sitting with a woman in nursing school, who had an paper due, and the husband had GPT write a paper for her subject, reading it aloud on his phone. The nursing student became alarmed and said she couldn't turn something like that in, and it was important for her to write it herself. The husband seemed sure she could get away with it. "My professor is very smart," she said. At that point, I interjected and told the husband, "it's also frequently wrong."
If people who use it actually need be told that, no wonder they think they're "programming".