Comment by ModernMech

Exactly, "productivity" and similarly "efficiency" are meaningless weasel word unless they're qualified and measured against something. So which measurable things? Let's start with just anything really because then we could ground the conversation in something real rather than just feelings of being more productive, which can be deceptive.

AnimalMuppet in their reply to my OP comment makes the point that these things haven't been around long enough to measure end-to-end productivity gains and come to a conclusion either way, and I agree with that. But we can still at least be measuring something.

For example, in my case AI has allowed me to write 10x more LOC than I usually would in a similar amount of time. But having to review it all, I've also deployed 1/4 the number of releases I normally would in the same period. By one measure I'm more productive, by another I'm less productive.

People could claim to be more productive by skipping the review. But in that case did AI make you more productive or did you lower standards? People could say they're using AI to do the review but is the impact of that being measured and has that caused more or fewer bugs? If more bugs, has the time to fix those been factored into overall productivity? In my experience it's common for people to eagerly count immediate productivity gains and discount long-term productivity sinks.

For this reason I think case studies are the best convincing thing, because they properly contextualize the usage and consider a longer-term window. They're also backwards looking instead of in-the-moment, so have the benefit of hindsight. But they're harder to come by and we probably won't see any meaningful case studies for a thing that people say happened in November.

But the very least people can be doing is just defining what they mean when they say "productivity" because otherwise everyone is talking past one another.