Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do more than just write code I want faster, but except for problems where I have trouble figuring out how to express what I want in code, they're not necessarily the solution to any problem I have.

If they could write exactly what I wanted but faster, I'd probably stop writing code any other way at all because that would just be a free win with no downside even though the win might be small! They don't write exactly what I want though, so the tradeoff is whether the amount of time they save me writing it is lost from the extra time debugging the code they wrote rather than my own. It's not clear to me that the code produced by an LLM right now is going to be close enough to correct enough of the time that this will be a net increase in efficiency for me. Most of the arguments I've seen for why I might want to consider investing more of my own time into learning these tools seem to be based on extrapolation of trends to up to this point, but it's still not clear to me that it's likely that they'll become good enough to reach a positive ROI for me any time soon. Maybe if the effort to actually start using them more heavily was lower I'd be willing to try it, but from what I can tell, it would take a decent amount of work for me to get the point where I'm even producing anything close to what I'm currently producing, and I don't really see the point of doing that if it's still an open question if it will ever close the remaining gap.