I think 2x or 3x is maybe too generous. Obviously pure code output is extremely high but I would think for something to truly be a 2x a company would either have to be able to effectively get rid of half its SWE workforce or produce enough to make some notable increase in revenue.

It doesn't seem like the SWE labor market has been shedding anywhere near that order of magnitude of jobs (there are about 1.7 million SWEs in the USA alone) or that companies going heavy into AI are boosting revenue significantly.

I think all things considered we're only getting a single digit percentage total productivity increase.

We might be producing shovelfuls of code at 10-20X the previous rate, but we're not producing value proportionally, maybe we are even inversely proportionally.

At most places I've worked, the "designing and writing code" part (basically the part that LLMs can do) was maybe 5-15% of the calendar time it took to actually get the software out into the market. The remaining 85-95% of the time was spent on squishy people-things like aligning stakeholders, getting executive buy-in, working with x-functional teams, getting priorities aligned so one team wasn't done in 30 minutes while the other team took 30 days, doing security reviews, doing privacy reviews, doing legal reviews, doing QA and verification, lining up marketing, educating salespeople, waiting for people to get back from vacation, waiting for people to get back from sick leave, waiting for people to respond to their E-mails, waiting for people to click "approved" on various internal review sites, doing final reviews with executives so they know what their company is doing. These other things take up the vast majority of the time it takes to release a feature. LLMs are only speeding up the relatively tiny 'code writing' part.