Personally, I use LLMs as a time saving tool. It writes the code I tell it to write then I carefully review all of it, every line. It saves about 50% of my time, which is very useful. Like you, I’ve been coding for 40 years in a variety of languages.

I write code for a large non profit and we quite frankly simply don’t have the manpower (or money) to do all the projects we want to do that will improve people’s lives. So it’s a reasonable compromise. AI never touches our codebase and never has access to it at all.

It’s a tool, like any other. Anyone who sets up a table saw to run by itself without careful monitoring and expertise would be fired immediately. Same thing for “vibe coders”.