Punishment eh? Serves them right for being skeptical.
I've been around long enough that I have seen four hype cycles around AI like coding environments. If you think this is new you should have been there in the 80's (Mimer, anybody?), when the 'fourth generation' languages were going to solve all of our coding problems. Or in the 60's (which I did not personally witness on account of being a toddler), when COBOL, the language for managers was all the rage.
In between there was LISP, the AI language (and a couple of others).
I've done a bit more than looking at this and saying 'huh, that's interesting'. It is interesting. It is mostly interesting in the same way that when you hand an expert a very sharp tool they can probably carve wood better than with a blunt one. But that's not what is happening. Experts are already pretty productive and they might be a little bit more productive but the AI has it's own envelope of expertise and the closer you are to the top of the field the smaller your returns in that particular setting will be.
In the hands of a beginner there will be blood all over the workshop and it will take an expert to sort it all out again, quite possibly resulting in a net negative ROI.
Where I do get use out of it: to quickly look up some verifiable fact, to tell me what a particular acronym stands for in some context, to be slightly more functional than wikipedia for a quick overview of some subfield (but you better check that for gross errors). So yes, it is useful. But it is not so useful that competent engineers that are not using AI are failing at their job, and it is at best - for me - a very mild accelerator in some use cases. I've seen enough AI driven coding projects strand hopelessly by now to know that there are downsides to that golden acorn that you are seeing.
The few times that I challenged the likes of ChatGPT with an actual engineering problem to which I already knew the answer by way of verification the answers were so laughably incorrect that it was embarrassing.