They do, for many people. Perhaps you need to change your approach.

The code I've seen generated by others has been pretty terrible in aggregate, particularly over time as the lack of understanding and coherent thought starts to show. Quite happy without it thanks, haven't seen it adding value yet.

Or is the bad code you've seen generated by others pretty terrible, but the good code you've seen generated by others blends in as human-written?

My last major PR included a bunch of tests written completely by AI with some minor tweaking by hand, and my MR was praised with, "love this approach to testing."

If you can produce a clean design, the LLM can write the code.

I think maybe there's another step too - breaking the design up into small enough peices that the LLM can follow it, and you can understand the output.

So do all the hard work yourself and let the AI do some of the typing, that you’ll have to spend extra time reviewing closely in case its RNG factor made it change an important detail. And with all the extra up front design, planning, instructions, and context you need to provide to the LLM I’m not sure I’m saving on typing. A lot of people recommend going meta and having LLMs generate a good prompt and sequence of steps to follow, but I’ve only seen that kinda sorta work for the most trivial tasks.

Unless you're doing something fabulously unique (at which point I'm jealous you get to work on such a thing), they're pretty good at cribbing the design of things if it's something that's been well documented online (canonically, a CRUD SaaS app, with minor UI modification to support your chosen niche).

And if you are doing something fabulously unique, the LLM can still write all the code around it, likely help with many of the components, give you at least a first pass at tests, and enable rapid, meaningful refactors after each feature PR.