There's a lot of extreme takes on this both ways — "AI will replace all developers" on one side, "vibe coding is a scam for people too lazy to learn to code" on the other. Both are wrong in ways worth actually explaining, since a lot of people making these arguments haven't actually used these tools seriously.
What AI coding tools are genuinely good at: generating a working first version of something fast, scaffolding boilerplate you'd otherwise type out by hand, explaining unfamiliar code, and handling well-trodden patterns — a login form, a CRUD API, a basic dashboard. If your project looks like a thousand other projects the model has effectively seen, it's genuinely fast and genuinely useful. This isn't a small thing — a huge share of real business software is exactly this kind of unoriginal, well-understood plumbing.
What it's genuinely bad at, consistently: anything requiring real architectural judgment across a large, existing codebase, anything where the "right" answer depends on business context the model has no way of knowing, and — the part that catches people out worst — security and edge cases. AI-generated code frequently looks completely correct and passes a casual glance while missing input validation, handling errors silently instead of properly, or getting authorization logic subtly wrong.
A generated login flow that "looks done" and a login flow that is actually secure are not automatically the same thing, and the gap between them isn't obvious to someone who can't read the code critically.
The actual skill that matters now isn't "can you type code fast," it's "can you tell when the generated code is subtly wrong." That's a genuinely different skill from writing code from scratch, and it's arguably harder to teach, since reviewing code critically requires understanding it as deeply as writing it does, sometimes more.
My honest take: it's a real, legitimate productivity tool for the boring 80% of most projects, and a genuinely risky one for the specific 20% that actually needed real expertise — and the businesses getting burned right now are mostly the ones that couldn't tell which part of their project was which.
Curious what others here who've actually used these tools seriously think — where has it actually worked for you, and where has it bitten you?
Xpiriatech
