I completely agree with all of these observations.

And indeed for me, the biggest productivity boost has nothing to do with my "typing speed" or any such nonsense, it's that it can help with writer's block and other kinds of unhelpful inertia.

It kind of reminds me of ADHD medication: it alleviates the "inability to direct attention at one thing" problem, but actually exacerbates the "time blindness" and "hyperfocus" problems.

I think probably a lot of complex tools have these characteristics: useful in some ways, liable to backfire in others, and ultimately context-sensitive (and maybe somewhat unpredictable) in their helpfulness.

Hopefully as LLMs are more widely experimented with by developers, the conversation can continue to move away from thinking about the effects of LLM use in terms of some uniform/fungible "productivity" and towards understanding where it hurts and where it helps, how to tell when it's time to put it away, what kinds of codebases are really hurt by that kind of detached engagement, and what kinds of projects leverage that sort of rapid prototyping the most effectively.

Plausible text generation is an almost magical trick, whether it's generating human language or computer code. But it turns out it's not a silver bullet, no matter how impressive the trick is. It's more interesting than a silver bullet, in fact: it's a system of surprising tradeoffs, even for different phases of the same overall task.