Why AI Code Generation Lost Its Hype Cycle Sheen

After years of "GitHub Copilot will replace developers" rhetoric, adoption data shows code generation tools plateau at specific, narrow tasks—boilerplate scaffolding and test writing—rather than delivering the full-stack automation vendors promised. The constraint isn't model capability but organizational integration: enterprises still need humans to architect systems, debug failures, and maintain code that AI wrote but nobody fully understands. As technical debt accumulates, the economic case for these tools weakens.