Currently living in the UK where average principal salaries are less than entry level. Even better working for a US corp and having to deal with the complete lack of understand about why we aren't nearly as motivated as our US counterparts
The problem is that hidden among that complexity/detail is often the value that software developers bring e.g. security issues, regulatory compliance, diagnosability/monitoring, privacy, scalability, resilience etc.
There will be bugs that the AI cannot fix, especially in the short term, which will mean that code needs to be readable and understandable by a human. Without human review that will likely not be the case.
I'm also intrigued by "see if it works". How is this being evaluated? Are you writing a test suite, manually testing?
Don't get me wrong, this approach will likely work in lower risk software, but I think you'd be brave to go no human review in any non-trivial domain.
The underlying tech choice only matters at the moment because as software developers we are used to that choice being important. We see it as important because we currently are the ones that have to use it.
As more and more software is generated and the prompt becomes how we define software rather than code i.e. we shift up an abstraction level, how it is implemented will become less and less interesting to people. In the same way that product owners now do not care about technology, they just want a working solution that meets their requirements. Similarly I don't care how the assembly language produced by a compiler looks most of the time.
"people are just more productive" is not the case for everyone. That relies on a lot of variables; type of work being done, as you mention the office environment, whether the people you're working with are in that office etc. My home office is far superior to any environment I've ever been given by an employer. I have multiple large screens, control over the heating, a door I can close and most importantly a cat to stroke whilst thinking.
Anecdotally I find extroverts prefer the office and introverts prefer home. I find that seamless access to people can be really distracting especially when I'm doing focus work.
I think you're correct if people are given a good work environment, are in on the same days and are all in the same office this makes sense. The reality is that in many large organizations this isn't the case.