2024 I'd use "the tools" to generate snippets that I would copy-paste and massage into my larger projects. Those snippets tended to be 2 to 6 lines long, and they'd be usefully correct about 80% of the time. I laughed at people who were "vibe coding" with those tools, even in early 2025. Like Linux in 1994, I'd call it "interesting, not ready for prime-time."

By mid 2025, I saw the potential for improvement - but the better the code output got, the louder and more irrational the online reactions against it got - up until the past month or so it was like a guaranteed brigade of negativity.