I see two basic cases for the people who are claiming it is useless at this point.

One is that they tried AI-based coding a year or two ago, came to the IMHO completely correct at that time conclusion that it was nearly useless, and have not tried it since then to see that the situation has changed. To which the solution is, try it again. It changed a lot.

The other are those who have incorporated into their personal identity that they hate AI and will never use it. I have seen people do things like fire AI at a task they have good reasons to believe it will fail at, and when it does, project that out to all tasks without letting themselves consciously realize that picking a bad task on purpose skews the deck.

To those people my solution is to encourage them to hold on to their skepticism. I try to hold on to it as well despite the incredible cognitive temptation not to. It is very useful. But at the same time... yeah, there was a step change in the past year or so. It has gotten a lot more useful...

... but a lot of that utility is in ways that don't obviate skilled senior coding skills. It likes to write scripting code without strong types. Since the last time I wrote that, I have in fact used it in a situation where there were enough strong types that it spontaneously originated some, but it still tends to write scripting code out of that context no matter what language it is working in. It is good at very straight-line solutions to code but I rarely see it suggest using databases, or event sourcing, or a message bus, or any of a lot of other things... it has a lot of Not Invented Here syndrome where it instead bashes out some minimal solution that passes the unit tests with flying colors but can't be deployed at scale. No matter how much documentation a project has it often ends up duplicating code just because the context window is only so large and it doesn't necessarily know where the duplicated code might be. There's all sorts of ways it still needs help to produce good output.

I also wonder how many people are failing to prompt it enough. Some of my prompts are basically "take this and do that and write a function to log the error", but a lot of my prompts are a screen or two of relevant context of the project, what it is we are trying to do, why the obvious solution doesn't work, here's some other code to look at, here's the relevant bugs and some Wiki documentation on the planning of the project, we should use {event sourcing/immutable trees/stored procedures/whatever}, interact with me for questions before starting anything. This is not a complete explanation of what they are doing anymore, but there's still a lot of ways in which what an LLM can really do is style transfer... it is just taking "take this and do that and write a function to log the error" and style-transforming that into source code. If you want it to do something interesting it really helps to give it enough information in the first place for the "style transfer" to get a hold of and do something with. Don't feel silly "explaining it to a computer", you're giving the function enough data to operate on.