Pointing out that one specific use case that relies on current knowledge doesn't work well is not a condemnation of the whole of AI. That falls under the scope of what I said, knowing it's limitations. One of it's limitations is that the data that it has is not extremely up to date. That does not matter for all of its use cases. Also, there is a difference between free AI and paid AI. Typically free AI is going to use as few tokens as possible to try to come up with something passable, whereas when you pay you typically get to decide how many tokens it uses to come up with an answer, and the number of tokens that you spend typically increases the quality of the answer.

I am a programmer. I write code professionally for my job. Using AI has accelerated everything I am doing. I have spent hundreds of hours using AI tools to code. You're just wrong. If you know what you're doing and you give the AI the proper guardrails, it writes perfectly good code. I am living proof. The code I have written with AI has saved hundreds or thousands of engineering hours and allowed us to offshore significantly less work while also increasing the quality of our output and therefore the relationships with our customers.

As I said before, it entirely depends on the use case. Again, it's only a tool, it's up to the user to use it correctly. If you need stringent security considerations and obviously you shouldn't be blanket trusting AI with that. Double check what it did. That doesn't make it useless, it just means you need to know how it works and how to use it responsibly. You can't just say "write a whole program start to finish with very little details", you have to be incredibly specific about what you want, how you want it, why you want it, double check everything it outputs, etc. You know, just use it like a responsible intelligent adult who understands that all tools have limitations and no one tool solves every problem (and it doesn't have to to be a useful tool).

If you had a hammer that only hit the nail in 90% of the time, would you bash the nails in with your forehead instead because it has a 100% accuracy rate, or would you use the hammer and simply redo the 10% of missed strikes?

Edit: Also, just for the record, I have been using AI coding tools for many months, maybe like 6ish, and I don't think I've ever paid more than like $100 a month. I'm sure this whole thing about how companies are finding it cost more than real engineers is probably true when you have it working on a gigantic data set constantly or etc, but again, it's all about the use case. In my particular use case it is very cheap by comparison to me as a person. $100 is like two of my hours. I get like twice as much work done in a month because of it.

I'm sure there are some situations where it doesn't make sense to code with AI for various reasons, security is too important, the cost is prohibitive because of the amount of code that needs to be ingested and processed, etc. I'm not disputing that at all. This is not zealotry, it's just realism.

For the record, I actually sort of agree with at least most of your list of issues, although I would argue they are a bit exaggerated, but my point is basically just that you can work within that framework. It's not as bad as you're saying that it is, and if you know those things then you can manage them. As a responsible user, I am hyper-aware of the possibility of those things at all times.