I guess there are things it's better at?

You either write them by hand, or use a tool that generates it locally, upload everything and you're done. Perfect security. Great performances.

It's in this sense that static generators go back to the source, the simply produce dumb HTML files that you upload/publish to a web server that doesn't need to run any code. Just serve files.

The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate. Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the average writer.

And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's definitely written by AI.

AI tools can absolutely contribute usefully, I can't keep count of the times where an AI pointed to an edge case I didn't think about, then helped me write the fix and the test for the issue.

I'm not vibe coding, as I'm reviewing the code, but saying they can't be useful means you haven't taken the time to look at the state of them recently.

So most software developers in France are absolutely software engineers.

Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.

Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.

And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.

And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

Now the problem is that they're not "dumb" enough as they have a web browser, youtube etc, but that can be considered fine because the experience for those is so bad that it's unlikely to get addicting.

Just like alcohol and tobacco, it's bad for adults but way worse for kids.

(and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)

With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.

https://www.unihertz.com/fr-fr/products/jelly-star

- Because it's small, it doesn't look like a regular smartphone

- The small size would make it impractical for social media/scrolling/videos even if I were to unlock it

...but compared to a dumbphone, I can still allow Spotify and their school management software so they can access their schedule and homework

Japanese people will tell you about those because they really don't like seeing people do it.

The rest, well, don't worry about it.

Where I live we get a phone call the same day if our kids miss a class without prior notice.