there's been some (what appears to me to be) remarkable progress in the field, in that I know that it's possible to create intentional structures. it's very much not my field so I can't speak to it in detail, I think the best way I could describe where I understand it to be is that it's like people building with lego, if that makes sense?
but yeah it's still a damn far way off from what we'd call "gene programming" as we have "computer programming"
not all crayon - some are spaghetti and sauce