I am sympathetic to his view because I also considered the whole AI hype train a complete scam until pretty recently. When I saw enough people validating that coding agents were actually legitimately ok and sometimes good at things, I decided to spend $50 on one to test it out.

I have been pleasantly surprised at its utility knocking out grunt work. It's not super smart, but it's great at things like writing a python script to edit characteristics of a jsonl file or sorting structured data. I didn't ever expect it to be useful beyond extremely limited output and it's actually kinda good when you know how to narrowly target the tasks. The constraints of code make it a more suitable category than all the other stuff.

It's still a bs hype machine with Elon saying it might save all of humanity in court today. That's pretty unlikely.