I don't see why a payoff would have appeared yet. Many (but certainly not all) software companies have increased their output without hiring more people. But having software with more features doesn't necessarily drive immediate productivity gains in the rest of the economy. It will take time for those benefits to percolate. We've only had access to models good enough to majorly accelerate code writing since early-2026. I feel like we're in the very beginnings of the first part of this wave.

For sake of comparison, consider e-commerce. As a proxy for "impact on the economy", we can use Amazon's revenue. They went public in 1997 and that year had revenue of $148M (just 0.14% of Walmart's revenue that year). By 2000, revenue was $2.76B (1.65% of Walmart). Bricks and mortar didn't start feeling anything until probably 2011, when Amazon crossed 11% of Walmart's revenue. And it wasn't until 2025 that Amazon finally surpassed Walmart.

But, if you worked in tech in the e-commerce business, things were already feeling pretty hot by 2007. And at that point in time, the e-commerce sector was still miniscule compared to traditional retail (~4%). Software is very exciting these days and the most fantastic things are happening. They will eventually percolate out to the rest of the economy. But it will take many years before everyone notices the difference.