The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired".
But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.
But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.
In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers. Maybe you can claim that it's better than 60% of engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel engineers tend to not publish their works online for it to be used as training data, but for every one of those you have a bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a living putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done using code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself immediately and say that it's about 40%.
The same goes for every other output: it's gonna make the world's most average article, the most average song in a genre and so on. You can nudge it to be slightly better than the average with great effort, but no, you absolutely cannot make it better than most.
For most engineers the ability might be there, but the motivation or willingness to write, for example, 20 different test cases checking the 3 line bug you just fixed is fixed FOR SURE usually isn't there. You add maybe 1-2 tests because they're annoying boilerplate crap to write and create the PR. CI passes, you added new tests, someone will approve it. (Yes, your specific company is of course better than this and requires rigorous testing, but the vast majority isn't. Most don't even add the two tests as long as the issue is fixed.)
An AI Agent will happily and without complaining use Red/Green TDD on the issue, create the 20 tests first, make sure they fail (as they should), fix the issue and then again check that all tests pass. And it'll do it in 30 minutes while you do something else.
IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.
I'm not against using AI by any means, but I know what to use it for: for stuff where I can only do a worse than half the population because I can't be bothered to learn it properly. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'd say I'm definitely better at my niche than 50% of the people. There are plenty of other niches where I'm not.
By leaving the busywork for the drones, this frees up time for the mind to solve the interesting and unsolved problems.
If you feed it only good code, we'd expect a better result, but currently we're feeding it average code. The cost to evaluate code quality for the huge data set is too high.
You can do some basic checks like "does it actually compile", but for the most part you'd really need to go out and do manual categorization, which would be brutally expensive.
Yeah, you come across as someone who thinks that the AI simply spits out the average of the code in its training data. I don't think that understanding is accurate, to say the least.
And there are a bunch of engineers from certain cultures who don't know what they don't know, but believe that a massive portfolio of slop is better than one or two well-developed projects.
I can only hope that the people training the good coding models know to tell AI that these are antipatterns, not patterns.