Where's the evidence of competitors being 10x more productive? So far, everyone is simply bragging about how much code they have shipped last week, but that has zero relevance when it comes to productivity

Read it as just a given rate. The number doesn’t matter too much here, if company B does believe claims from company A they are N times more productive that’s enough to force B to adopt the same tooling.

I feel like a lot of the AI advocacy today is like the Cloud advocacy of a few years ago or the Agile advocacy before that. It's this season's silver bullet to make us all 10x more effective according to metrics that somehow never translate into adding actually useful functionality and quality 10x as fast.

The evangelists told us 20 years ago that if we weren't doing TDD then we weren't really professional programmers at all. The evangelists told us 10 years ago that if we were still running stuff locally then we must be paying a fortune for IT admin or not spending our time on the work that mattered. The evangelists this week tell us that we need to be using agents to write all our code or we'll get left in the dust by our competitors who are.

I'm still waiting for my flying car. Would settle for some graphics software on Linux that matches the state of the art on Windows or even reliable high-quality video calls and online chat rooms that don't make continental drift look fast.