Figuring out the best way to determine productivity is still a hard problem, but I think it's a category error to think that productivity gains go exclusively to the company.
If all (or even most) of the engineers on your team who were previously your equal become durably twice as productive and your productivity remains unchanged, your income prospects will go down, quite possibly to zero.
I'm 100x as productive now that I eat breakfast while reciting the declaration of independence.
You really should try it. Don't give up, it works if you do it just right.
Edit: I realize this line of argument doesn't really lead anywhere. I leave you with this Carl Sagan quote:
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
(or perhaps we can just agree that claims require evidence, and not the anecdotal kind)
The thing is there are loads of people making these claims and they aren't that extraordinary.
The claims for coding productivity increases were extraordinary 12 months ago, now they are fully realized and in use every day.
So many people get ad hominem wrong.
I'm intrigued that someone who made a bad faith comparison like you would be so aghast at an ad hominem.
That didn't actually happen in this thread, though. A comment was characterized as "immature". That might be insulting, but it's not an ad hominem attack.
Saying "this argument sucks" just isn't attacking an argument by attacking the credibility of the arguer. Using terms that can describe cognitive temperament or ability to directly characterize an argument might seem more ambiguous, but they don't really qualify either, for two reasons:
1. Humans are fallible, so it doesn't take an immature person to make an immature argument; all people are capable of becoming impatient or flippant. (The same is true for characterizations of arguments in terms of intelligence or wisdom, whatever.)
2. More crucially, even if you do read it as implying a personal insult, a direct assertion that an argument, claim, or comment is <insert insulting term here> is inverted from that of an ad hominem attack: the argument itself is asserted to evince the negative trait— rather than the negative trait, having been purportedly established about the person, being used to undermine the argument without any connection asserted between it and the argument other than that both it and the negative trait belong to the arguer.
You might call this, if you think the person saying it fails to show or suggest why the comment in question is "immature" or whatever a baseless insult, but it's not an ad hominem attack because that's just a different rhetorical strategy.
But it's pretty clear that it's more a form of scolding (and maybe even pleading with someone to "step up" in some sense) than something primarily intended to insult. Maybe that's useless, maybe it's needlessly insulting, maybe it involves an unargued assertion, but "ad hominem" just ain't what it is.
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Fwiw, after writing all that, I kinda regret it even though I stand by the contents. Talk of fallacies here has the problems of being technical and impersonal, and perhaps invites tangents like this.
This is not a mature thing to say: " I eat breakfast while reciting the declaration of independence."
Maybe the skeptics are just reasonable people that don't want to waste time now for learning efforts that are not supposed to exist at all. In the end, the only good move is to wait for predictable methods of using agents, or more likely, once it's been established, it will be builtin into agents, and the dread of using those unbearable tools will vanish by itself.