To be fair the pitch has frequently been that Devin/Claude/Astra/whatever is some sort of superhuman bottled John Carmack that will single-handedly replace entire teams of developers.

Yea, that extreme side exists too. Truth is inbetween. AI with the instructions from a dev that knows what it is doing writes better code than most regular 9-17 devs.

And it can -- if an able person wields it.