I think experiences are highly variable based on the person and stack. I'd say I've gotten a ~50% productivity boost. I'm quite senior, make FAANG money.

I work in typescript, rust, and go - mostly typescript. LLM coding is an order of magnitude better at typescript than these other languages. To contrast, LLMs seem mostly useless for rust.

I also use cursor, which is a big jump over other code assistants.

And finally I understand how to prompt LLMs accurately. This is a new tool and from interacting with coworkers in the same codebase I can say many smart people have not yet learned how to use the tools effectively.

But if you just assume that everyone catches up to where I am today with cursor + typescript the change is massive.

I disagree. The more senior you are, the easier it is to generate something and be convinced that "ok, this is good enough" or "aight, I see these things that need to be changed instantly". Frankly, compared to others, I don't have that much experience (about 10+ish years), but it saves quite a lot of time for me.

It takes a bit time to build intuition around the workflow, but when you get going, it seems surprisingly useful. I was a skeptic before as well, btw.

One of my co-workers is going all in with one of them in his IDE, as part of a pilot program for using it at our company, and ever since it seems like he's gotten dumber, but by outside metrics he's probably "more productive": Merge requests that don't work (in a whole variety of ways), going really fast by opening new merge requests without fixing the old ones, local changes with no thought to the larger structure, and so on. About half the time I feel like I'm spending more time commenting on these merge requests than if I'd just done it from scratch.

>Juniors need to learn by falling on their face a few times, if companies don't want to train them then they'll never become seniors.

It's rare that anyone gets trained by a company who doesn't already know something and is pivoting to a new role. It's unfortunate but that's just the way it's always been. Juniors have to be proactive and bust their ass to become mid level, usually by learning new stuff at home through building stuff on their own and reading obsessively. The hardest part for a junior to get is their first paid job, and more often than not, that first job will be at a shit hole. Juniors should take advantage of it and really bust their ass to impress them and improve themselves. Once they get a couple of strong learning years under their belts, it gets a bit easier.

If you are a junior and the company is paying you to learn stuff, consider yourself extremely lucky.

Companies are in desperate need of strong talent. To succeed, juniors need to force themselves to become strong talent.

If there is a finite amount of software to be written in the world, and an increase in productivity of developers than that amount of software is done with less people. Also, if AI allows an non-software person say an marketing person, write a python script to query a few databases. Than the 10 person business data science team might not need a body as they no longer have to deal with the 10% lower level stuff.