It is not when you stop kidding yourself : using AI has nothing to do to improve the quality of the code. It is a vanity status, at this point.
Refusing to use AI honestly seems more like vanity to me. Like "no machine could ever do what I do".
That said I would not necessarily accuse people who don't want to use AI of vanity - there are good reasons not to want to use it - but if someone else did it I'd find it easier to understand.
Imagine if I exposed my API keys and just said “sorry boss, I took a pill before the job and I hallucinated”
Like Allbirds, a shoes company that somehow now does AI.
Allbirds is definitely not vanity. That's a scam.