You don't need to use LLMs for coding to stay "competitive" with your colleagues.

I work for a FAANG, we have unlimited AI credits to be used on any model we want, with basically any tooling we want.

My whole team massively uses AI, I barely do. I use not even 10% of the tokens that they do. Yet I have not only the highest rate of PRs raised, but also the highest rate of PRs I reviewed, and the second lowest number of revisions per PR.

AI is all about fake productivity. You feel productive while you're achieving the same, if not less (or even often, nothing at all).

Long term it's pretty obvious that people heavily using AI will become a lot less productive, if not simply unable to work as software engineers. My colleagues are already scared.

In fact, as a challenge to anyone who says they "haven't written a line of code by hand in X amount of time", go do a test. Try to write any code without any LLM use for just 30 minutes.