Developers are cashing in on the productivity gains. Meaning instead of using the increased productivity to do more work, they just become lazier or do fun irrelevant side projects instead, where as before there was just not much time for such things. I have definitely procrastinated on work simply because I know I can swoop in with an LLM and do it all in 15 minutes, whereas before I would have spent a few hours.

This is how LLMs can both result in greater productivity yet still not appear to yield much more benefit than the pre-LLM era.

And there is no benefit to the developer for doing the work first then just sitting idle. That’s how you get people putting more things on your plate.