It remains to be seen whether these tools are actually a net enhancement to productivity, especially accounting for longer-term / bigger-picture effects -- maintainability, quality assurance, user support, liability concerns, etc.

If they do indeed provide a boost, it is clearly not very massive so far. Otherwise we'd see a huge increase in the software output of the industry: big tech would be churning out new products at a record rate, tons of startups would be reaching maturity at an insane clip in every imaginable industry, new FOSS projects would be appearing faster than ever, ditto with forks of existing projects.

Instead we're getting an overall erosion of software quality, and the vast majority of new startups appear to just be uninspired wrappers around LLMs.

I'm not necessarily talking about AI code agents or AI code review (workflows which I think are difficult for agentic workflows to really show a tangible PoV against humans, but I've seen some of my portfolio companies building promising capabilities that will come out of stealth soon), but various other enhancements such as better code and documentation search, documentation generation, automating low sev ticket triage, low sev customer support, etc.

In those workflows and cases where margins and dollar value provided is low, I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where possible.

Even reaching this point was unimaginable 5 years ago, and is enough to show workflow and dollar value for teams.

To use another analogy, using StackOverflow or Googling was viewed derisively by neckbeards who constantly spammed RTFD back in the day, but now no developer can succeed without being able to be a proficient searcher. And a major value that IDEs provided in comparison to traditional editors was that kind of recommendation capability along with code quality/linting tooling.

Concentrating on abstract tasks where the ability to benchmark between human and artificial intelligence is difficult means concentrating on the trees while missing the forest.

I don't foresee codegen tools replacing experienced developers but I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.