I understand where you're coming from, and think there is something missing in your final paragraph that I'm curious to understand. If LLMs do end up improving productivity, what would make them go away? I think automated code generators are here until something more performant supersedes them. So, what in your mind might be possibilities of that thing?

Well I guess I no longer believe that long term, all this code generation would make us more productive. At least not how the fan favorite claude-code currently does it.

I've found some power use cases with LLMs, like "explore", but everyone seems misty eye'd that these coding agents can one-shot entire features. I suspect it'll be fine until it's not and people get burned by what is essentially trusting these black boxes to barf out entire implementations leaving trails of code soup.

Worse is that junior engineers can say they're "more productive" but it's now at the expense of understanding what it is they just contributed.

So, sure, more productive, but in the same way that 2010s move fast and break things philosophy was, "more productive." This will all come back to bite us eventually.