[b_e_n_t_o_n]

This take seems fair, the headline kind of removes the nuance. There are times where generating a lot of low quality code quickly is useful. And there are situations where the required code is simple and common and LLMs can spit out working code that's decent quality, even if it doesn't understand it. In those cases the developer doesn't really need to exert much mental effort to write it, but they save time by not having to write it.

I find AI more useful for all the things that are secondary to writing code - things like accessibility passes over HTML, generating documentation, creating debug UI's, figuring out some library or API so I don't need to read the docs, debugging build issues (unrelated to my code), and in general managing all the BS we've self-inflicted on ourselves so I can focus on just writing code. AI probably saves me 1-2 hours a day, which is hardly a 10x speed up but it's still really significant. And those numbers are in line with a recent study the UK government did on AI assisted software development, although I didn't save the link to it.