> but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem

I agree to some extent with regards to writing new code. One piece where I have been perpetually impressed is at asking it to put together a plausible explanation of how something weird has happened. I have been blown away, multiple times, by Codex and Claude’s ability to take a prompt like “When I did X, I expected Y to happen but instead observed Z. Put together an explanation for how that could happen, including the individual lines of code that can lead to ending up in that state.”

In one notable case, it traced through a pretty complex sensor fusion -> computational geometry problem and identified a particular calculation far upstream that could go negative in certain circumstances, which would lead to a function far downstream generating a polygon with incorrect winding order (clockwise instead of CCW).

In another, it identified a variable that was being initialized to 0 instead of initialized to (a specific runtime value that it should’ve been initialized to during a state transition). The downstream effect, minutes later, would be pathological behaviour that would happen exactly once per boot.

In both cases I was provided with a specific causal chain of events with individual source files and line numbers so that I could verify the plausibility of the explanation myself.

That is how I use it too, for explanations and suggestions when I run into something unexpected. It is incredible in the back seat.

I don't mean to completely dismiss their utility. I realized recently that I was having more fun coding than I ever remember. It is a strange feeling to go along with vibe out there that software developers are becoming obsolete.