> If its two empirical premises—that the accidental/essential distinction is real and that the accidental difficulty remaining today does not represent 90%+ of total—are true, then the conclusion which rules out an order-of-magnitude gain from reducing accidental difficulty follows automatically.

The article goes on to assume there’s no 10x gain to be had but misses one big truth.

Needing to type the code is an enormous source of accidental difficulty (typing speed, typos, whether you can be arsed to put your hands on the keyboard today…) and it is gone thanks to coding agents.