> With all due respect to folks working on web and phone apps, I keep getting the feeling that AI is great for high level, routine sorts of problems and still mostly useless for systems programming.

I agree. AI is great for stuff that's hard to figure out but easy to verify.

For example, I wanted to know how to lay out something a certain way in SwiftUI and asked Gemini. I copied what it suggested, ran it and the layout was correct. I would have spent a lot more time searching and reading stuff compared to this.