Brutal counter take: If AI tooling makes you so much better, then you started very low. In contrast, if you are already insanely productive in creative ways others can hardly achieve then chances are, AI tools don't make much of a difference.
As someone who is starting very low — I very much agree. I'm basically a hobbyist who can navigate around Python code, and LLMs have been a godsend to me, they increased my hobby output tenfold. But as soon as I get into coding something I'm more familiar with, the LLMs usefulness plummets, because it's easier and faster to directly write code than to "translate" from English to code using an LLM (maybe only apart from using basically a smarter one-line tab completion)
