But he's right. Many aspiring programmers have fallen for the same trap. They don't want to learn to program, they want to have made a program. While you can write your magnum opus, a video game, or an operating system kernel, without learning to program first, it's infinitely more difficult than doing it the other way around.
He talks about the "acquaintance trap" that we are put in, when someone pulls this on us.
If you ask a pro for feedback; especially one that demands a lot from themselves (like most folks at the top of their game), you will be judged as a pro.
I have been on both sides of this, on the asking side, as an artist, and on the judging side, as a software developer.
There are few signs of becoming a "master" at software development, but I'd say one of them is gaining a better understanding of how to judge beginners.
Eventually you reach a level of mastery where with just as little effort as you see the beginner's mistakes, you see the thought process that lead to those mistakes.
As soon as you're not a beginner their mistakes seem obvious, but approaching varied and complex problems often enough eventually gives way to the realization most beginner mistakes have similar underlying causes to the "professional" mistakes. It's only how far you need to zoom out to see the underlying cause of the mistake that changes.
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The beginner does a poor job defining requirements so their Hello [name] generator form breaks when the user types in "\n John". They only made a label tall enough to show one line of text. They see it as "I didn't make the label autosize" or something though, even when told the solution.
The professional does a similarly poor job with requirements, and the system breaks down on some unexpected input in production months down the line... the professional might save the day and write a slick postmortem about how they saved the day using their skills. But it takes a lot more experience to reach the point where that experience evolves into a blanket change for project kickoffs for example, so the owners of external systems can better define requirements that affect them.
I don't know professional writing well enough to know if the situation is similar.
But he's right. Many aspiring programmers have fallen for the same trap. They don't want to learn to program, they want to have made a program. While you can write your magnum opus, a video game, or an operating system kernel, without learning to program first, it's infinitely more difficult than doing it the other way around.