I disagree that everything AI generates is garbage, but I do agree with the "contributing anything real" comment. That might seem like it is at odds with each other, but I have a one word reason: perl.

Back in the day, I worked extensively in perl and really did believe in TIMTOWDI. The problem with TIMTOWDI is TIMTOWDI, though. Not every system I built needed to be some unique butterfly. I just needed it to function (preferably with high efficiency). Then I started working in group projects. Perl is awful outside of single-developer environment. Imagine 5 people all declaring their own best practices and refusing to compromise as it would "violate best practices" that they had just set for themselves.

There is value in NOT creating new ways to do things simply because you can. This becomes clear the first time someone approaches you about building our own security library for something. You have no idea the amount of code copied from stackoverflow that exists in production unattributed. It simply works and no one is going to care (usually not even the people posting these solutions - which includes myself).

Even outside of that, if I sat and wrote a sub() to do some recursive file handling, I don't own that code like some intellectual property regardless how cleverly I wrote it. I combined several documented parts into a single idea. If I don't own those parts, I don't see how I can own the idea that was built from them.