Key words there. To you, it's a electric saw because you already know how to program, and that's the other person's point; it doesn't necessarily empower people to build software. You? Yes. Generally though when you hand the public an electric saw and say "have at it, build stuff" you end up with a lot of lost appendages.
Sadly, in this case the "lost appendages" are going to be man-decades of time spent undoing all the landmines vibecoders are going to plant around the digital commons. Which means AI even fails as a metaphorical "electric saw", because a good electric saw should strike fear into the user by promising mortal damage through misuse. AI has no such misuse deterrent, so people will freely misuse it until consequences swing back wildly, and the blast radius is community-scale.
> more like going from analog photography to digital photography. Whatever it is, you get more programming done.
By volume, the primary outcome of digital photography has been a deluge of pointless photographs to the extent we've had to invent new words to categorize them. "selfies". "sexts". "foodstagramming". Sure, AI will increase the actual programming being done, the same way digital photography gave us more photography art. But much more than that, AI will bring the equivalent of "foodstagramming" but for programs. Kind of like how the Apple App Store brought us some good apps, but at the same time 9 bajillion travel guides and flashlight apps. When you lower the bar you also open the flood gates.
