Ever since FORTRAN came on the scene, there have been tools that make disdainful, unskilled programmers more productive. I doubt this will ever change. It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. There’s a much smaller risk to your business when you hire ten and get one or two good ones in the lot, than if you hire one good one and pay them triple. Things average out, and you’re not beholden to a few people who know their worth. As long as the pay is good enough to keep a couple of competent people around, you can rely on them to cover for the rest. Best of all, you never have to figure out which is which.

They’ll have to learn Angular for their new job, so “no desire to learn” seems harsh and unfair

As someone who enjoys tech, I don't really fault or look down on people who get into tech for the pay like some in our field seem to do. In basically every other field on the planet that is high paying, people go into it for the money, not for some passion - so whats different about ours?

I don't really mind whether you have some innate desire to learn something, or if you're doing because its your job and your job pays you. As long as in the end you suck it up and do it.

If your github-fu was good, you could get the same result with copy-pasting. But then you would need to worry about licenses. It's very convenient that Copilot and the like don't disclose the licenses of their training data.

I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.)

If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.