Being a million monkeys or not, it is a tool. The relevant definition for tool is:

something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation

That's not to say it's a good tool, or that it's a tool being used appropriately by many people. What even is appropriate use of AI?

Accountability should be definitely be properly assigned to the user. I've heard of tradies blaming their tools for shitty work, but I've never heard of one actually holding their hammer accountable..

I hate to be that guy but there are compilers with non-deterministic optimization strategies and they do tend to be the most performant. They're just generally disallowed in major project distributions because the maintainers want the artifact to be verifiable by and end user for security reasons.

That quote was someone else

"LLMs are good enough now," said Greg Kroah-Hartman, a veteran Linux kernel maintainer, at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in South Korea in August. "They've gotten good enough to find bugs because LLMs, AI, are just pattern matchers and code is nothing but patterns in a specific format."

Also to be fair, that quote is about finding bugs and the guy might not have been talking about using AI to patch them. The article makes it sound that way, but the article also seems overly confident and pro-AI about some other things too.

You can deterministically find something that is clearly defined, but bugs don't fall into that category

Fame does something to people, either that or he's burnt out and this is a midlife crisis. I love unix based operating systems, but sometimes I feel Linux was the wrong thing to get popular unfortunately. It abandons so much of the core philosophy.

Given the same input, a compiler will always produce the same output, down to the last bit. The same cannot be said about AI

LLM's have something like a temperature setting that is producing the intentional randomness, so that you prompting it is not going around in circles all the time. (if you are running an army of agents this is actually important for usefulness)

Anyway this is not an inherent LLM thing, it can be turned off.

just because AI can find a working pattern doesn’t make it good

It's a wee bit more sophisticated than that, and will tend to find 2 + 2 even when 16/4 - 8/4 gives the same result. And if you suspect it's settled on an over-complicated solution you can add the prompt: "Search for simpler architectures which meet all requirements with less complexity." It won't always find the simplest possible, but generally speaking - I find LLM agents to be a bit better than my human colleagues in terms of finding good simple solutions and also finding problems within implementations.

None of us are perfect, and LLMs are trained on our writings. LLM agents within coding frameworks have progressed easily +10 years of human experience in their perfomance levels in the last 12 months. It's still an blueberries to tangerines comparison, a lot of what makes the LLM agents "good" is their speed and thereby ability to experiment with alternatives in a reasonable time.