I don’t agree with your take on AI and the comparison at all, however if you want to use them and stay independent in the future it’s probably best to use Mistral. Their models are available for download and (mostly) licensed under Apache 2.0. You only have to pay for commercial use. Also they’re basically the only big EU-company in that space and the only I know of where the web interface isn’t infested with trackers and shit. However they are also involved in the military (guess which edge models are running on those semi-autonomous drones in Ukraine).

All I need to know is does it solve a problem I have, does it work, is it stable, and is it secure.

You have to be aware that

• LLMs are recreating licensed code without telling you, which WILL fuck you over eventually
• They do not produce secure code on their own. Keys end up client-side, in widely opened S3 buckets, encryption falsely implemented etc. Widely known, no link needed.
• It is not faster, in fact you’re slower while merely feeling faster. By now even the techbros themselves just recently finally admitted that.
• There’s no point to mention the immorality of the tech, everyone should know by now.

So yeah, your choice how much you use it. But it’s pretty obvious why nobody trusts vibe-coded stuff, and the metric ton of low-quality projects even forcing the de-facto App Store of a whole ecosystem to completely ban AI code reeeally doesn’t help.