I've had some free time recently so I've been trying to use the various AI tools to do a greenfield project with Rails. I know the stack intimately, so it's been a useful exercise as a check against hype. While I can occasionally trust the tooling to make big changes, most of the time I find that even the small changes are wrong in some important, fundamental way that requires re-writing everything at a later time. Asking the models to fix whatever is broken usually results in an endless cycle of (very junior-like!) random changes, and eventually I just have to go in and figure out the fundamental restructure that fixes the issue.
Would this be good enough for someone writing a one-time-use, bespoke piece of software? Maybe. Would they be able to maintain this code, without having a truly senior-level ability to work with the code itself? No [1].
I'm less fearful of LLM taking experienced programmers' jobs [2], because I fundamentally think this kind of stuff plays in the same end of the market as knockoff designer goods, Ikea furniture, and the like. It makes custom software available to an entire customer segment that couldn't have afforded it before, but nobody is going to confuse it with a product made by a team of skilled professionals [3,4].
[1] But to a really inexperienced developer, it looks the same.
[2] I am more fearful of clueless business types, who think this technology obviates the need for programmers.
[3] ...but will unskilled professionals be under pressure? Maybe!
[4] ...and what about skilled people, using the same tools? My current hypothesis is they're beneficial, but ask me again in six months.