> it's failing to keep up on the skills that keep you employed.

I judge "failing to keep up" by my ability to "catch up". Right now if I search for paying courses on AI-assisted coding, I get a royal bunch for anything between 3$ to about 25$. These are distilled and converging observations by people who have had more time playing around with these toys than me. Most are less than 10 hours (usually 3 to 5). I also find countless free ones on YouTube popping up every week that can catch me up to a decent bouquet of current practices in an hour or two. They all also more or less need to be updated to relevancy after a few months (e.g. I've recently deleted my numerous bookmarks on MCP).

Don't get me wrong, LLM-assisted coding is disruptive, but when practice becomes obsolete after a few months it's not really what's keeping you employed. If after you've spent much time and effort to live near that edge, the gap that truly separates you from me in any meaningful way can be covered in a few hours to catch up, you're not really leaving me behind.

The burden of proof lies with he who makes grand claims. My counterargument in the face of your lack of evidence is: “Where are all the improvements to my daily life? Where are the disrupting geniuses who go-to market 100x faster than their Luddite counterparts?”

To paraphrase another analogy that I enjoyed, it’s a bit like when 3d printing became a thing and hype con artists claimed that no one would buy anything anymore, you could just 3d print it.

I have found that maximising AI coding is a skill on its own. There is a lot of context switching. There is making sure agents are running in loops. Keeping the quality high is also important, as they often take shortcuts. And finally you need an somewhat of an architectural vision to ensure agents don’t just work in a single file.

This is all very tiring and difficult. You can be significantly better than other people at this skill.

  AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluating it fairly) a huge boost to productivity .

And yet, the only research that tries to evaluate this in a controlled, scientific way does not actually show this. Critics then say those studies aren’t valid because of X, Y or Z but don’t provide anything stronger than anecdotes in rebuttal.

It’s ridiculous double standard and poisons any reasonable discussion to assert something is a fact and anyone who disagrees is a hysterical Luddite based on no actual evidence.