> My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect.

I totally agree with this. Although also, you can end up in a bad spot even after you've gotten pretty good at getting the AI tools to give you good output, because you fail to learn the code you're producing well.

A developer gets better at the code they're working on over time. An LLM gets worse.

You can use an LLM to write a lot of code fast, but if you don't pay enough attention, you aren't getting any better at the code while the LLM is getting worse. This is why you can get like two months of greenfield work done in a weekend but then hit a brick wall - you didn't learn anything about the code that was written, and while the LLM started out producing reasonable code, it got worse until you have a ball of mud that neither the LLM nor you can effectively work on.

So a really difficult skill in my mind is continually avoiding temptation to vibe. Take a whole week to do a month's worth of features, not a weekend to do two month's worth, and put in the effort to guide the LLM to keep producing clean code, and to be sure you know the code. You do want to know the code and you can't do that without putting in work yourself.