I don't like the phrase "real coder". It's not clear what it means.

I really like the word "assistant" for what we have today. The AI code assistant tools available today, like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, can't replace humans in doing software development. Not even close. But they are often useful to human developers, and today, that's the more important measure.

I've been spending time with various AI tools, especially Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. They're amazing one minute, and they make bone-headedly bad recommendations the next. It takes effort to learn how to create good prompts, and if you want the results to be good, you have to review and critique the results. I'm particularly concerned about security. They're definitely happy to write insecure code. If you know what you're doing, prompt them well, and review their results, you can get good results.

I don't know if they'll ever reach "full autonomy". They don't need to get there to be useful.