What is going on right now?

The heart of the article is this conclusion, which I think is correct from first-hand experience with these tools and teams trying to use them:

So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever?

Objectively, it would seem the answer is no.

The main benefit I've gotten from AI that I see no one talking about is it dramatically lessens the mental energy required to work on a side project after a long day of work. I code during the day, it's hard to find motivation to code at night. It's a lot easier to say "do this", have the AI generate shitty code, then say, "you duplicated X function, you over complicated Y, you have a bug at Z" then have it fix it. On a good day I get stuff done quicker, on an average day I don't think I do. However, I am getting more done because the it takes a huge chunk out of the mental load for me and requires significantly less motivation to get something done on my side project. I think that is worth it to me. That said, I am just about to ban my junior engineers from using it at work because I think it is detrimental to their growth.

I agree with the side-project thing, where the code is only incidental to working on the real project. I recently wanted to organize thousands of photos my family had taken over decades and sprawled on a network drive, and in 5 minutes vibe-coded a script to recursively scan, de-dupe, rename with datetime and hash, and organize by camera from the EXIF data.

I could have written it myself in a few hours, with the Python standard docs open on one monitor and coding and debugging on the other etc, but my project was "organize my photos" not "write a photo organizing app". However, often I do side projects to improve my skills, and using an AI is antithetical to that goal.