Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost?
I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that the limited amount of time I get to spend writing code is probably the highlight of my job and I'd be effectively replacing that with more code reviews.
I recently inherited an over decade old web project full of EOL'd libraries and OS packages that desperately needed to be modernized.
Within 3 hours I had a working test suite with 80% code coverage on core business functionality (~300 tests). Now - maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours, but I know empirically that they cover a majority of the code of the core logic. We can now incrementally upgrade the project and have at least some kind of basic check along the way.
There's no way I could have pieced together as large of a working test suite using tech of that era in even double that time.
If you haven't reviewed and signed off then you have to assume that the stuff is garbage.
This is the crux of using AI to create anything and it has been a core rule of development for many years that you don't use wizards unless you understand what they are doing.
I'd say for what I'm trying to do - which is upgrade a very old version of PHP to something that is supported, this is completely acceptable. These are basically acting as smoke tests.
I'm not having AI write tests for life-or-death software nor did I claim that AI wrote tests that all pass without updating any code.
For God's sake that's completely slop.
And maybe child is too simplistic of an analogy. It's more like working with a savant.
The type of thing you can tell AI to do is like this: You tell it to code a website... it does it, but you don't like the pattern.
Say, "use functional programming", "use camel-case" don't use this pattern, don't use that. And then it does it. You can leave it in the agent file and those instructions become burned into it forever.
That's all to say the learning curve with LLMs is how to say things a specific way to reliability get an outcome.
There is obvious division of ideas here. But calling one side stupid or referring to them as charlatans is outright wrong and biased.
There is a reason why they struggle selling them and executives are force feeding them to their workers.
Charlatan is the perfect term for those that stand to make money selling half baked goods and forcing more mass misery upon society.
