> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up

Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all understand, and we don't have it now.

Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management would even use: they decide how productive you are based on completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.

If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really seems to have changed"

"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.