I think they're being silly, but it's a pretty common trope: comparing the weird, sometimes highly idiosyncratic syntactical constructs of programming languages to a series of magical incantations.
Lev Grossman wrote an entire book that hinged on this idea of melding magic with technology.
I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too.
Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.
Well LLMs also spout a lot of bullshit sometimes. I had a conversation with one just recently where it couldn’t do arithmetic too well with a challenge involving coins of a foreign currency. I think maybe it got tripped up because the convo got a bit too long or maybe it didn’t like that I was using the dollar sign.
You can also make LLMs agree with your own biases for some reason. For example, the people who use them to plan shady stuff.
