I think it's a complex discussion because there's a whole bundle of new capabilities, the largest one arguably being that you can build a conversational interface to any piece of software. There's tons of pressure to express this in terms of productivity, financial and business benefits, but like with a coding agent, the main win for me is reduction of cognitive load, not an obvious "now the work gets done 50% faster so corporate can cut half the dev team."

I can talk through a possible code change with it which is just a natural, easy and human way to work, our brains evolved to talk and figure things out in a conversation. The jury is out on how much this actually speeds things up or translates into a cost savings. But it reduces cognitive load.

We're still stuck in a mindset where we pretend knowledge workers are factory workers and they can sit there for 8 hours producing consistently with their brain turned off. "A couple hours a day of serious focus at best" is closer to the reality, so a LLM can turn the other half of the day into something more useful maybe?

There is also the problem that any LLM provider can and absolutely will enshittify the LLM overnight if they think it's in their best interest (feels like OpenAI has already done this).

My extremely casual observations on whatever research I've seen talked about has suggested that maybe with high quality AI tools you can get work done 10-20% faster? But you don't have to think quite as hard, which is where I feel the real benefit is.