This really is it: AI produces bad to mediocre code. To someone who produces terrible code mediocre is an upgrade, but to someone who produces good to excellent code, mediocre is a downgrade.
The problem is the 0.05X developers thought they were 0.5X and now they think they're 20X.
Rather, to me it looks like all we're getting with additional time is marginal returns. What'll it be in 1 year? Marginally better than today, just like today is marginally better compared to a year ago. The exponential gains in performance are already over. What we're looking at now is exponentially more work for linear gains in performance.
Still bad code though
And by bad I'm not making a stylistic judgement. I mean it'll be hell to work with, easy to add bugs, and slow to change
You think it'll rapidly get smarter, but it just recreates things from all the terrible code it was fed. Code and how it is written also rapidly changes these days and LLMs have some trouble drawing lines between versions of things and the changes within them.
Sure, they can compile and test things now, which might make the code work and able to run. The quality of it will be hard to increase without manually controlling and limiting the type of code it 'learns' from.