The impression I’ve gotten, fooling around with it at home and talking to friends in tech and hearing from actual users online is:

A good developer can develop faster with it. Giving it small, discrete tasks for first drafts or throw away code (like bash scripting) can work well.

It’s better google. If you are trying to figure out if a function that will do a thing exists, or are trying to figure out what architecture would work best in a given situation, it can be helpful. But in these cases, it should be used carefully - dont ask it to do your work for you, ask it to give you options, pros and cons, and sources. But in this regard, it can do a lot to help an experienced developer become more productive faster in a stack or tool they are unfamiliar with.

Vibe coding is a real thing, and it can work. For internal tools in a small company, a non-technical person can create a mostly functional piece of software to get a job done. My expectation is that over time, these people will become real developers, as they end up dealing with bugs and edge cases in the vibe code they created.

At the top end of ai-for-software-development, there is some sort of something with automated iterative looping and verification, where a developer can translate a set of requirements into code, and then a collection of ai agents iteratively develop the code until it works as expected. This is what the tech bros seem really hyped on, and it does seem to work… but at the same time, my feeling is that this is how you get multimillion dollar AI bills. And presuming this is how big tech is developing their products - it seems prone to making inefficient, buggy code, so I don’t think it will be worth it long term.