We've been debating how to measure software engineering productivity since long before LLMs. It depends on so many different factors. Scrum is sort of the only tool we have that comes close, but we all hate it. Aside from that, all we really have are personal anecdotes.

Here are my personal anecdotes for the week. I occasionally ask AI to write some SystemVerilog test bench code. This is an area where I have deep and long experience. AI has never once saved me time with that. Just yesterday, however, I was writing a tricky Makefile, something I rarely do, and AI helped a lot.

Aside from productivity, this article mentions ethical and financial issues with AI. That doesn't stick with the subject that the title of the essay implies, but it's a more concrete thing to discuss and I wish we'd spend more time on that. I think that's where people really are fooling themselves.