“The agent generates the boilerplate in seconds. The system design, the integration, the debugging take twice as long because the agent did not understand what it generated.”
The framing is exactly right. AI tools collapse the time spent on routine work, which is the part of the job most people enjoyed because it produced visible progress. The remaining work is now disproportionately the hard part. Architecture, debugging, integration, taste. None of it gets faster. Most of it gets harder when the code under your fingers is one you did not write. The net productivity story is murkier than the marketing claims.