> Narrow AI, AI with guardrails, AI with multiple safety redundancies - these don't elicit the same reaction. They seem to be valid, acceptable forms of automation.

Maybe because AI is only good at things that have been artificially made crappy?

Search engine? AI is a godsend at wiping out all the advertising and SEO glop since circa 2000. 80%+ of my AI stuff is something a search engine could do 25 years ago.

Produce a shell script example that a junior needs? AI is very good at coughing up the code for a bunch of things that have disastrously bad documentation from 1985 or disastrously stupid implementations from 1990 such that a junior engineer can finally get on with what they're supposed to be doing.

Generating the same webby Javascript slop that as everybody else in the universe? Solid--but the question is "If the Javascript slop is so boilerplate to generate that an AI can generate it, why does it exist, at all?" People have been lamenting the death of Hypercard, VB6, and Flash for a yonks age now and yet we still don't have replacements with the same ease of use.

Doing mind-numbing refactors of my codebase or generating boilerplate unit tests? Okay-ish. But why doesn't my editor have easy access to the AST so that I can type a couple of keystrokes and do it myself (thankfully this finally seems to be coming online).

Every single thing that AI produces okay-ish results for me on is something that has either been artificially enshittified or could have been automated decades ago.