Anyway we don't need more efficient average programmers, time-to-market is rarely down to coding speed / efficiency and more down to "what to build". I don't think AI will make "average" software development work faster or better, case in point being decades of improvements in languages, frameworks and tools that all intend to speed up this process.

Yes. The "true" average software quality is far, far lower than the average person perceives it to be. ChatGPT and other LLM tools have contributed massively to lowering average software quality.