Comment by alfalfasprout

I would speculate that it's because there's been a huge concerted effort to make people want to believe that these tools are better than they are.

The "economic experts" and "ml experts" are in many cases effectively the same group-- companies pushing AI coding tools have a vested interest in people believing they're more useful than they are. Executives take this at face value and broadly promise major wins. Economic experts take this at face value and use this for their forecasts.

This propagates further, and now novices and casual individuals begin to believe in the hype. Eventually, as an experienced engineer it moves the "baseline" expectation much higher.

Unfortunately this is very difficult to capture empirically.