> he might shrug and say "I don't know"
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
I've moved completely to EliteBooks and am very happy with my decision. The build quality is superb, they're upgradeable, everything is replaceable and there's an excellent market and after market for parts, and HP has codepaths in their firmware for Linux support, meaning even Modern Standby works well.
Price points for refurb and used hardware are great, too.
[1] https://ubuntu.com/certified
It has no fans.
It's temperature never changes unless you really push it. I've never used any other laptop where I could feel at least some warmth when it was turned on.
My m1 air still has enough battery to run for a full day of usage, here several years after I bought it. Basically never loses power while the lid is closed either, but that is less of an issue.