They are not the same thing, unless they achieve what a 1x programmer won't on a lifetime on a day-to-day basis.

If the 10x, 100x or 1000x programmer does not do the 10x, 100x or 1000x times on average on their day to day then they are not 10x, 100x or 1000x programmers.

(for whatever the heck a 1x programmer is, which people talking about 10x programmers oddly always skip on giving any decent definition)

Yes, exactly.

The best programmers can produce code every day that a mediocre programmer cannot ever produce under any conditions. That is the entire point of the discussion.

I don't even think it's that controversial of a statement, just shift to another field and I think it's self-evident. Paul Erdos could on any day produce better mathematics than the rest of us could produce in a lifetime. Not better maths than his peers, but his peers were also exceptional. Better than the average person who knows how to do their times tables though? Absolutely.

Most people might never realized things like that, because they aren't good enough at math (or software) to see the difference between an ordinary everyday mathematician (if there was something like that -- maybe a high school mats teacher), and Paul Erdos.

Maybe from most people perspective, everyone else is about as bright as everyone else. Because they cannot tell the difference. (And instead people fallback to things like how others dress and how self confident they sound)

I would argue that that's not the case for most programmers, at least not in the sense of developing a new p2p protocol, or a fast inverse square root algorithm. Would John Carmack code, e.g. a checkout system for an iPhone app 1000x faster than most programmers? I doubt that.

The interface he produced for that checkout system, the naming conventions he chose, the nature of state encapsulation, the testability of it? Yes, I believe Carmack would produce _better_ code in all those things than the median programmer every time.

There is much more to 10x than how many lines of code you can produce. A monkey on a keyboard can type faster than Carmack but productivity is not assisted. No one is arguing that a 10x programmer is more efficient by way of swift fingers.