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The AI Coding Boom: Productivity Miracle or Mass Unemployment?

AI coding tools are delivering real but narrower productivity gains than advertised—controlled experiments show 55% speed improvements on simple tasks, while field studies of experienced developers on complex codebases show a 19% slowdown, and aggregate employment data shows no statistically significant job losses three years after ChatGPT's release. The sharpest documented harm is concentrated among early-career workers, where multiple independent studies find 13-16% relative employment declines in AI-exposed roles driven by reduced hiring rather than layoffs, while senior developers and AI-fluent workers command growing wage premiums. Non-Western evidence complicates the Western "displacement vs. miracle" framing entirely, with China, India, Japan, and Gulf states deploying the same tools toward sovereignty, equity, and knowledge-preservation goals—and reporting workforce expansion rather than contraction.

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