Current AI coding assistants are best at writing functions or adding minor features to an existing code base. They are not agentic systems that can develop an entire solution from scratch given a specification, which in my experience is more typcical of the work that is being outsourced. AI is a tool, whose full-cycle productivity benefit seems questionable. It is not a replacement for a human.

I don't know what's your experience with outsourcing. But people outsource full projects not the writing of a couple of methods. With LLMs still unable to fully understand relatively simple stuff, you can't expect them to deliver a project whose specification (like most software projects) contains ambiguities that only an experienced dev can detect and ask deep questions about the intention and purpose of the project. LLMs are nowhere near that. To be able to handle external uncertainty and turn it into certainty, to explain why technical decisions were made, to understand the purpose of a project and how it matches the project. To handle the overall uncertainties of writing code with other's people's code. All this is stuff outsourced teams do well. But LLMs won't be anywhere near good for at least a decade. I am calling it