I would not say they were bad, mostly just primitive compared to what we have today. I can only presume they are talking about GitHub Copilot which was released before ChatGPT. I believe at the time it was little more than “spicy autocomplete.” Yet it could be surprisingly capable, e.g. I recall this blog, also pre-ChatGPT: https://medium.com/data-science/github-copilot-crushes-data-...

That said I did happen to work with a team in ‘21 - ‘22 that got access to an older coding model from OpenAI, also called Codex, through a corporate partnership. We also tested it out in an autocomplete UX. Our experience was rather hit-or-miss and I was a bit skeptical of AI-based coding at the time. That blog post above and others like it were an eye-opener and made me wonder if we were just “holding it wrong.”

Then ChatGPT was released. It was nowhere as good as the models today but it could write reams and reams of correct code and I realized the world had changed forever.