I beg to differ. My diffs are 10x bigger than before though i don't have any more time to review them.
This is the point that the author is making. 10x bigger diff is probably not leading to 10x productivity.
[In fact you can sometimes find that 10x bigger diff leads to decreased productivity down the line...]
I'm a pretty huge proponent for AI-assisted development, but I've never found those 10x claims convincing. I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.
That's not too far from this article's assumptions. From the article:
> I wouldn't be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn't translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.
I think that's an under-estimation - I suspect engineers that really know how to use this stuff effectively will get more than a 0.2x increase - but I do think all of the other stuff involved in building software makes the 10x thing unrealistic in most cases.
[And to those saying we're using it wrong... well I can't argue with something that's not falsifiable]