Sure, you have your John Carmaks' or Antirezs' of the industry who are 10x programmers and also successful founders but those guys are 1 in a million.
But your usual 10x engineer you'll meet is the guy who knows the ins and outs of all running systems at work giving him the ability to debug and solve issues 10x quicker than the rest, knowledge which is highly specific to the products of that company and is often non-transferrable and also not useful at entrepreneurship.
Becoming the 10x engineer at a company usually means pigeonholing yourself in the deep inner workings of the products, which may or may not be useful later. If that stack is highly custom or proprietary it might work in your favor making you the 10x guy virtually unfireable being able to set your own demands since only you can solve the issues, or might backfire against you at a round of layoffs as your knowledge of that specific niche has little demand elsewhere.
You're talking about the 100x engineer now. The 10x engineer is the normal engineer you are probably accustomed to working with. When you encounter a 1x engineer, you will be shocked at how slow and unproductive they are.
Well, Of Course I Encountered Him. He's Me.
AI can help with that.
Current AI is still at the state of recommending people jump off the golden gate bridge if they feel sad or telling them to change their blinker fluid.
With AI I can do the same in 15 seconds. We’re talking a 120x increase in productivity not a 3x improvement.
Which means that after a brief honeymoon period, the effect of AI will be to heavily reduce labor costs, rather than push for turbocharged "productivity" with greatly diminishing returns.
IME LLMs are great at giving you the experience of learning, in the same way sugar gives you the experience of nourishment