My least favorite part of this trend is the ageism. "Crusty curmudgeons are not up-to date with the latest bloat if they think RTFM is still a thing", "Oh, you didn't like ORMs? Did you try letting an AI generate code for your ORM?"

Maybe in the future all of these assistants will offer something amazing, but in my experience, there is more time invested in prompting that just reading the relevant documentation and having a coherent design.

My suspicion is that many, (but not all please no flames) of the biggest boosters of AI coding are simply inexperienced. If this is true, it makes sense that they wouldn't recognize the numerous foot-guns in AI generated code.

As an experienced coder, I find ai invaluable for a ton of stuff, nearly none of it writing production code.

* Variable naming

* Summarizing unfamiliar code

* Producing boilerplate code when I have examples

* Producing one-liners when I've forgotten the parameter order or API specification. I double check, but this is basically a Google that directly answers your question

* Pre-code brainstorming

* Code review. Depending on the language it can catch classes of problems that escape linters

In my experience it won't produce production-ready code, but it's great as a rubber duck and a second pair of eyes.

It’s brilliant because you can always shift the blame on the user. Wrong prompt, wrong model, should have used an agent and ran 3 models in parallel, etc.

Meanwhile we get claims that the tools are as capable as a junior programmer, and CEOs believe that.

Yeah it's my favourite argument. Apparently this magical tool that can replace engineers and can do and write anything needs you to write prompts so detailed that you could have just written the damn code yourself, and probably had an easier time with it to boot.

The whole thing feels like we're in a collective delusion because idiotic managers and C-suites are blindly lapping up the advertising slop coming from the AI companies.