The most interesting thing for me is that I am sure it does.
I have been coding for 20+ years and I have used AI agents for coding a lot, especially for the last month and a half. I can't say for sure they make me faster.They definitely do for some tasks, but over all? I can solve some tasks really quickly, but at the same time my understanding of the code is not as good as it was before. I am much less confident that is is correct.
LLMs clearly make junior and mid level engineers faster, but it is much harder to say for Senior.
Exactly, I would be suspicious of anyone who can remember the syntax .
Timing functions is the most extreme example IMO. Being able to visualize a Bezier curve from cubic-bezier(0.47, -0.02, 0.57, 1.04), and THEN mentally map that to an animation behavior is just not humanly possible :)
3 years ago the idea of measuring productivity in lines of code would have been ridiculous. After AI, it is the norm.