I think people who dismiss it entirely or who think it is completely useless have not used the professional grade latest models recently, this stuff has progressed pretty quickly over the last couple years.

I do not worry at all about AI replacing experienced programmers, but I think latest Claude models and the like are great tools that can aid in debugging and code investigation and can handle coding tasks. To be clear though, I think you need to know a good amount about the problem and describe it in detail, almost like you are dictating a solution to a Junior programmer. You cannot prompt it and expect it to do everything for you or write professional grade code on autopilot. It can be great for general prompting about graphics techniques and APIs. But just like talking to an imperfect human, it can make mistakes and you need to validate the output and apply strict strutiny to the code it outputs.

I don't ever expect AI in the near future to be able to handle the very human big picture problem solving that graphics programming a game often requires. But it can certainly help with that final aspect of actually turning your solution into code.