It definitely is... But it's possible to be the most rigorous study and also not really prove anything. Proving this sort of stuff is ridiculously hard and expensive. We don't have proofs for even the most obvious things in programming, like that comments and good variable naming help comprehension. Sometimes studies even find the opposite.

I don't think that's true. In fact most people say the opposite - AI doesn't help junior devs because they can't recognise when it's bullshitting. I don't really believe that either - that's just ego talking. I expect it helps people of all experience levels fairly equally, but only with tasks that are relatively simple. It's not like senior engineers never do those though.

That's my issue with AI. I go to AI after my skills, the documentation and google failed me. Then I go to ChatGPT to get lied to, because ChatGPT doesn't know either.

And almost without fail, AI doesn't help me there.

The only thing where AI helps is AI autocomplete in die IDE, if I am doing something very simple and monotonous, then it helps me to sometimes reduce my typing speed a little bit compared to regular autocomplete.

But typing time is like 0.5% of the time I spend developing stuff.