I’ve been programming professionally for 29 years and with the right constraints (strongly typed language, strict linting, adversarial review styleguide, test coverage, clearly defined spec or requirements) it does indeed regularly write good code. All of the other stuff required is either set-once-and-forget or is also AI, and it does require supervision, but it writes good code the vast majority of the time.

Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.