Maybe there are people out there working in coding sweatshops churning out boilerplate code 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year - people who's job is 100% coding (not what I would call software engineers or developers - just coders). It's easy to imagine that for such people (but do they even exist?!) there could be large productivity gains.
However, for a more typical software engineer, where every project is different, you have full lifecycle responsibility from design through coding, occasional production support, future enhancements, refactorings, updates for 3rd party library/OD updates, etc/etc, then how much of your time is actually spent pure coding (non-stop typing) ?! Probably closer to 10-25%, and certainly no-where near 100%. The potential overall time saving from a tool that saves, let's say, 10-25% of your code typing is going to be 1-5%, which is probably far less than gets wasted in meetings, chatting with your work buddies, or watching bullshit corporate training videos. IOW the savings is really just inconsequential noise.
In many companies the work load is cyclic from one major project to the next, with intense periods of development interspersed with quieter periods in-between. Your productivity here certainly isn't limited by how fast you can type.
A 1% time saving for a $100k/yr position is still worth $83/month. And accounting for overhead, someone who costs the company $100k only gets a $60k salary.
If you pay Silicon Valley salaries this seems like a no-brainer. There are bigger time wasters elsewhere, but this is an easy win with minimal resistance or required culture change
Yeah, but companies need to see the savings on the bottom line, in real dollars, before they are going to be spending $1000/seat for this stuff. A theoretical, or actual, 1-5% of time saved typing is most likely not going to mean you can hire fewer people and actually reduce payroll, so even if the 1-5% were to show up on internal timesheets (it won't!), this internal accounting will not be reflected on the bottom line.
It's like saying "AI is going to replace book writers because they are so much more productive now". All you will get is more mediocre content that someone will have to fix later - the same with code.
10% more productive. What does that mean? If you mean lines of code, then it's an incredibly poor metric. They write more code, faster. Then what? What are the long-term consequences? Is it ultimately a wash, or even a detriment?
LLMs set a new minimum level; because of this they can fill in the gaps in a skillet — if I really suck at writing unit tests, they can bring me up from "none" to "it's a start". Likewise all the other specialities within software.
Personally I am having a lot of fun, as an iOS developer, creating web games. No market in that, not really, but it's fun and I wouldn't have time to update my CSS and JS knowledge that was last up-to-date in 1998.
