As a software engineer, I can tell you that it absolutely has increase productivity. Especially for small tasks without too much complexity. AI is really good for prototyping. The problems you hear about are mostly people who have no idea how to write propper code trying to mask their incompetence by writing AI code.

I usually outright reject code that is obviously AI. But I employ plenty of AI in my own coding. The trick is to always double check and rewrite segments that aren’t good enough.

The huge amount of garbage AI PRs ate an enormous problem. Especially for small open source projects. But the benefits are also pretty obvious.