I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.