Executives are the type of workers that have seen the increased productivity - it helps them write emails faster and summarize and digest long, mostly LLM-written, emails faster than before. Therefore, they think, it translates to everything else; writing code is just writing a foreign language for them, so, they figure, LLMs will do it, too.

They're extrapolating from their beliefs which they must hold given the investments they've already made in a fairly immature technology.

They have to believe that AI will lower their staffing costs and start generating serious revenues because to admit otherwise means they have failed to present an honest picture to their investors.

They're extrapolating from their PowerPoint slides, the single source of truth from which all else is manifested.

Depends on what you mean by significant. I’d say that at the very least I save 5-10min per hour using copilot when coding, and several times I’ve had tasks like “convert this untyped schema less json solution to a typed solution” which was basically solved immediately and entirely by copilot with one or two minor corrections. Also unit tests pretty much writes themselves these days.

Overall I would say that it’s not a revolution but definitely significant at this point. With and without copilot is as big a difference as coding in notepad vs an IDE when it comes to productivity gains for me.

I turned staff engineer a year and half ago, almost stopped developing, from time to time I have to, especially to take over tasks of people on summer vacation, having ChatGPT to help with small python scripts and GO apps was very helpful and time saving. I would not use it for full development tasks, but for small things is easy to understand what's wrong (and so far, there was always something wrong).

There are two sides to the story. Look at the unemployment rates or recent layoffs, a 2% difference is enough to disrupt a lot of things. You don't need a lot.

AI tools has made a significant impact already. But that significant number isn't '100%'.

On the main topic, of course you can't replace a team of 8 compromised of seniors, mids, and juniors with just 2 seniors. Nowhere near that.

Never underestimate the urge to be seen as a /thought leader/

Maybe they're extrapolating from people who did find a way to turn this new technology into a useful tool for themselves. That's the hacker way, after all.

yeah all I've seen so far is a very expensive but actually limited in features QoL upgrade that works for a very limited subset of the enterprise workforce.

(mostly copilot).