Your statement seems to be implying (correctly) that LLMs can program, but just not as well as humans. If they're able to program presumably without "thinking" as you seem to be (implicitly) narrowly defining it, then why do you think that limits them to always being sub-par?

It seems like if they can do it, that there's no reason they can't eventually be trained to do it better up to and beyond human performance. It seems strange to suggest that thinking unlocks some nominal margin of "better" specifically that can't be overcome.

All of that aside, even if they can't outperform the top human programmers...what if they get to within a margin where they're still better than most? Isn't a 95th percentile programmer that can run 24/7 and continuously refine its work still going to ultimately come out on top?