> A robust stdlib or framework is in line with what I'm suggesting, not a counterexample.
Maybe I didn't argue this well, but my point is that it's a spectrum. What about libraries in the java ecosystem like Google's Guava and Apache Commons? These are not stdlbibs, but they almost might as well be. Every non-trivial java codebase I've worked in has pulled in Guava and at least some of the Apache commons libraries. Unless you have some other mitigating factor or requirement, I think it'd be silly not to pull these in as dependencies to a project the first time you encounter something they solve. They're still large codebaes you're not using 99% of though.
I don't feel like my position on this is black-and-white. It is not always correct to solve a problem by adding a new dependency - and in the situation you describe - adding a sprawling UI framework would be a mistake. Maybe the situation is different in front-end land, but I don't see how AI really shifts that balance. My colleagues were not doing the bad or wrong thing by copying that incorrect code - tasked with displaying a human-readable file size I would probably either write out the boundaries by hand or copy-paste the first reasonable looking result from stack overflow without much thought too.
> At no point have I advised copying code from libraries instead of importing them.
I didn't say copying, though. I said replicating. If you ask AI to implement something that appears in its training data, there is a high probability it will produce something that looks very similar and even a non-zero possibility it will replicate it exactly. Setting aside value judgements, this is functionally the same as a copy, even if what was done to produce it was not copying.