I see so many testimonials that claim that AI is insanely good at coding now.

It's great if you don't know how to code. If you're already a dev it sort of helps speed up some issues, but it's far from perfect and you have to hold its hand a lot, particularly if you're not building a fresh app and are using legacy code.

Can it whip up a good website quickly? Hell yeah. Can it set up a complex project? Sort of, eventually, if you know how to design it correctly and keep it within those guidelines.

Where it really shines seems to be converting one language to another, debugging, and boilerplate work that just kinda sucks to do.

Caveat being, I'm mostly talking about the AI software regular folks have access to.

Most of this goes out the window if you're using Cursor. That fuckin thing is amazing. Not perfect, but way less of a problem than all the other "leading" coding AI solutions. ...And it costs a small fortune as a result.