This is such a wildly unsubstantiated claim. Where is the evidence of this happening ?
I run DevRel at Sourcegraph and our AI coding assistant, Cody, is used by tons of individuals, small business, and large enterprises. I get to talk to a ton of customers and see how their adoption of AI is going. And it's certainly increasing and developers are finding a ton of value.
GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and Phind are all a bit like this for me - they both lower the barrier of entry and save me a lot of time for trivial algorithms and boilerplate code, in addition to helping me find things better than search engines sometimes do, especially when given a look at the code that I'm working with.
It might not be an order of magnitude difference in my case, but things that wouldn't have happened with the higher barrier of entry are now happening and that's quite the difference in of itself! I'm cautiously optimistic about LLMs and other forms of "AI". If nothing else, so far we basically have a more versatile form of IntelliSense, even if it's not always going to output correct code.
I wonder if some day it'll be feasible to feed in the entirety of a larger codebase and reason about it better than people who only know a part of it could.
That's the real issue for me. I remember learning programming and I either had not so good intelligence (Codeblocks, IDLE, Netbeans) or none at all (notepad++,...). This forces me to either follow the book attentively (and hunting down errata) or read the manual and getting explanations from forums or friends. When you're a beginner, uou need a good source of truth, not something that can be subtly wrong.
Throw away apps are the easiest to make. No scaling, no bug fixing, no long term maintenance considerations, no consequences for poor architecture, no need to consider data models, you just write some shit. Bravo.
Recently I used Cody to rebuild the entire video processing pipeline and made it much more efficient and scalable, and I actually learned a ton about ffmpeg by pair programming with the AI. Now I'm building additional features into this app, mostly w/ just iterative prompting or chat-oriented programming to replace 3rd party services that are still in this pipeline and it's been a blast.
I've also used AI tools to really brush up on frameworks, like Laravel, that I haven't touched in a while, and it's been a great experience. Also started building a game w/ Godot and found AI super helpful there in walking me step by step. So for me it's been great.
Everything old is new again