Well, this kind of AI won't ever be useful as a programmer. It doesn't think. It doesn't reason. It cannot make decisions besides using a ton of computational power and enormous deep neural networks to shit out a series of words that seem like they should follow your prompt. An LLM is just a really, really good next-word guesser.
So when you ask it to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem, great it can do that. Because it saw someone else's answer. But if you ask it to solve it for a tower than is 20 disks high it will fail because no one ever talks about going that far and it flounders. It's not actually reasoning to solve the problem - it's regurgitating answers it has ingested from stolen internet conversations. It's not even attempting to solve the general case because it's not trying to solve the problem, it's responding to your prompt.
That said - an LLM is also great as an interface to allow natural language and code as prompts for other tools. This is where the actually productive advancements will be made. Those tools are garbage today but they'll certainly improve.
It's not gate keeping it is true. I know devs that say ai tools are useful but all the ones that say it makes them multiples more productive are actually doing negative work because I have to deal with their terrible code they don't even understand.
I literally don't write code anymore, I write detailed specs, invest a lot of time into my guardrails and integrations, and review changes from my agents. My code quality has not fallen, in fact we've been able to be much more strict about our style guidelines.
My job has changed completely, but the results are the same - simply much, much faster. And to be clear, this is in code bases that are hundreds of thousands of lines deep, across multiple massive monorepos, and using context from several different documentation sites - both internal and external.
If anything, people are understating the effects this will have over the next year, let alone further. The entry-level IC dev is dead. If you aren't producing at least twice as fast as you used to, you're going to be left behind. I cannot possibly suggest strongly enough that you start learning how to use it.
True, I use some local model by Jetbrains that only completes a single line and that's my sweet spot, it usually guesses the line well and saves me some time without forcing me to read multiple lines of code I didn't write.