Reality: the top nth percent of coders are seeing absurd, dramatic gains in productivity using LLMs. See: antirez, Simon Willison, Steve Yegge.

The more experience you bring to the table, the more value you get from these tools.

Look, about 12 years ago articles about how if you're not pair programming you're doing it wrong were on HN's home page every day. Doing well prompted plan -> agent -> debug cycles is like pair programming with someone that knows every SDK and API intuitively and doesn't have to pick up their kids from daycare at 4pm.