Agents are commoditizing the complement
Implementation — writing code — is a complement to specification — writing down what the code should do. Agents are commoditizing the former, pushing up demand for the latter.
The LLM productivity puzzle
Code generation is arguably one of the most interesting applications of LLMs, and one of the first with real commercial use (Copilot/Codex, Codegen, etc.). If you spend time on the internet these days you’ll see people claim productivity gains ranging from 0 to 100x, selection-biased to the high end (1). Whenever you see several orders of magnitude of disagreement, it’s worth trying to understand why.