If you’re not aware of what it’s good at, given what very smart people are saying and doing with it, I think you’re either not paying attention or aren’t being intellectually honest with yourself
Or those people aren't actually very smart, or they're caught up in the hype, or since they are very smart they exist in a mode where their experience doesn't translate to normal, everyday situations.
It seems that AI coding tools are very sensitive to codebase structure. If you work on a monolith with relatively simple, straightforward structure this is the happy path. A bird's nest of microservices is not. If your team has taken the time and effort to structure the codebase in a way that's amenable to AI, and you invest in the tooling, and you keep up that effort over time, then AI does seem to work.. Not "10x productivity gain" as they try to sell it to us, but maybe >1.0x. It's not clear, though, that for the vast majority of developers AI provides any speedup whatsoever. That's the problem. If it only works for the top 5% or whatever, that addressable market is very, very small.
Instead of appealing to authority you could have given direct examples of how it's transformed your ways of working, that could've continued the conversation somewhere.
I've seen a lot of very rich people* say it's amazing, it's changing my life, it's going to change your lives (it's going to take away all your jobs so we don't have to pay you anymore), we're about to hit the singularity and start a new golden age with it.
I've seen some apparently-smart people say they're using it for all kinds of things and it's doing great for them.
I've seen roughly the same number of apparently-smart people say they've tried it, they've given it a really good shot, but it doesn't work well for them, and in fact, when they tried, it made them less productive.
When I've personally tried it (almost exclusively on local generation), I've found it entertaining, but not reliable enough to use for more than that. And I do not trust any of the hosted models not to take everything I feed them and monetize it, including by selling it to organizations like ICE which I find utterly reprehensible.
So while I'm not bigstrat2003, about me, at least, you're wrong: I am paying attention, and I'm being intellectually honest. I'm also evaluating it for more than just "does this make me more money in the short term?"
* Who just so happen to be heavily invested in AI companies...
