It's possible we actually never had good metrics on software productivity. That seems very difficult to measure. I definitely use AI at my job to work less, not to produce more, and Claude Code is the only thing that has enabled me to have side-projects (had never tried it before, I have no idea how there are people with a coding full time job that also have a coding side project(s)).

This reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Lots of hype around something that was clearly globally transformation, but most people weren't benefiting hugely from it in the first few years.

It might have replaced sending a letter with an email. But now people get their groceries from it, hail rides, an even track their dogs or luggage with it.

Too many companies have been to focused on acting like AI 'features' have made their products better, when most of them haven't yet. I'm looking at Microsoft and Office especially. But tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Github Copilot CLI have shown that LLMs can do incredible things in the right applications.

  > zero impact on productivity

i'm sure someone somewhere will find the numbers (pull requests per week, closed tickets per sprint etc) to make it look otherwise...

You appear to have said a lot. Without saying anything.