When a person spends time with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That’s the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with others and outsourcing to others feels organic to the brain. LLM create the impression they have the cognitive ability to carry the load, but they don’t have the consistency of memory. You gladly assume you can finally get rid of a task and the model you trusted it to gets swapped under the curtain, or doesn’t train and improve on the task you outsourced, or the inference provider just quantizes it stupid. In the mean time you’ve lost your skill and your task has failed. Yes they feel good on some tasks some of the time, but still very much variably good (even same models different days of week or times of day). That’s closer to gambling and variable rewards than a spouse.
You're touching on utility.
We only ever bother learning something because it's interesting, or useful.
Things get muddier when you consider economy. Businesses exist to make money, and money is time.
AI is just another tool for business to manage time.
The 'dependency' and 'lock-in' are business leader issues honestly.
If you care about your craft, your skills, then you'll keep them sharp. You probably already enjoyed programming and it never felt like work.
On the other hand, if programming is just skills to pay the bills, then AI really can help you be more productive.
But then it's up to businesses to look ahead, manage their resources (human resources lol) and keep the business alive.
That means leaning on AI, simply become 'everyone else is doing it' and you have to compete for dollars.
Most people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it's presented well, and tastes great.