I was talking to some colleagues about this recently, and I think the reason non-coders and amateur coders seem to be so much more impressed by the current state of AI code gen is that they don't fully understand what actually goes into the average software project.
Setting up a simple game on your local machine really isn't that hard. For example, you can probably take an open-source project and with some minor alterations have something working pretty quickly.
But most software development doesn't work like this. You are typically given very explicit requirements and when you're working for a corporate with real customers you have high quality standards that need to be met. Often this is going to require a lot of bespoke code and high-level solutionising which you're not going to get out of some open source project (at least not without significant changes).
Similarly, productionising products requires a lot of work and consideration which spinning something up locally doesn't. You need to think about security, data persistence, hosting, deployment, development environments, documentation, etc, etc, etc...
I think this partly explains why people have such widely different opinions on these tools at the moment. I acknowledge they write pretty good code, but for me they're almost useless in 90% of the things I do and think about as a software engineer.
Setting up a simple game on your local machine really isn't that hard. For example, you can probably take an open-source project and with some minor alterations have something working pretty quickly.
But most software development doesn't work like this. You are typically given very explicit requirements and when you're working for a corporate with real customers you have high quality standards that need to be met. Often this is going to require a lot of bespoke code and high-level solutionising which you're not going to get out of some open source project (at least not without significant changes).
Similarly, productionising products requires a lot of work and consideration which spinning something up locally doesn't. You need to think about security, data persistence, hosting, deployment, development environments, documentation, etc, etc, etc...
I think this partly explains why people have such widely different opinions on these tools at the moment. I acknowledge they write pretty good code, but for me they're almost useless in 90% of the things I do and think about as a software engineer.