The reason why you see rational people believe the AI hype is that AI is a lot better than you give it credit for. They are right.
> I had to convince a customer the other day we cannot write whole apps with ChatGPT. As far as I know, not a single example exists of a full app written by ChatGPT. It just can't be done
It can. When it first came out, I wanted a macOS menu bar app so that I could access ChatGPT conversations from the menu bar. I’d never written a macOS app before. I told it what I wanted, it wrote the whole thing in one go. There was one minor compile error (a type signature had changed from a previous version, if I remember correctly), which was a one-line fix. I iterated a couple of times, telling ChatGPT what improvements I wanted to make to the app. It did them.
Would I use it to build a complex app? No. But it is capable of building a whole app.