Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?

If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.

I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.

Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?

Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?