[Kurtz79]

If we assume that AI coding actually increases productivity of a programmer without side effects (which of course is a controversial assumption, but not affecting the actual question):

1) If you are a salaried employee, if you are seen as less productive than your colleagues that use AI, at the very least you won't be valued as much. Either you will eventually earn less than your colleagues or be made redundant.

2) If you are a consultant, you'll be able to invoice more work in the same amount of time. Of course, so will your competitors, so that rates for a set amount work will probably decrease.

3) If you are an entrepreneur, you will be able to create a new product hiring less people (or on your own). Of course, so will your competitors, so that the expectations for viable MVPs will likley be raised.

In short, if AI coding assistants actually make a programmer more productive, you will likely have to learn to live with it in order to not be left behind.

[danaris]

This is only true if the degree to which they increase productivity meaningfully rises above the level of noise.

That is to say: "Productivity" is notoriously extremely hard to measure with accuracy and reliability. Other factors such as different (and often terrible) productivity measures, nepotism/cronyism, communication skills, self-marketing skills, and what your manager had for breakfast on the day of performance review are guaranteed to skew the results, and highly likely, in what I would guess is the vast majority of cases, to make any productivity increases enabled by LLMs nearly impossible to detect on a larger scale.

Many people like to operate as if the workplace were a perfectly efficient market system, responding quickly and rationally to changes like productivity increases, but in fact, it's messy and confusing and often very slow. If an idealized system is like looking through a pane of perfectly smooth, clear glass, then the reality is, all too often, like looking through smudgy, warped, clouded bullseye glass into a room half-full of smoke.

[bluefirebrand]

The problem is that it doesn't actually matter if it really makes a programmer more productive or not.

Because productivity is hard to measure, if we just assume that using AI tools is more productive we're likely to be making stupid choices

And since I strongly think that AI coding is not making me personally more productive it puts me in a situation where I have to behave irrationally in order to show employers that I'm a good worker bee

I am increasingly feeling trapped between a losers choice. I take the mental anguish of using AI tools against my vetter judgment or I take the financial insecurity (and associated mental anguish) of just being unemployed