In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever.

Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it.

Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes.

No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity.

When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.