[tdiff]

But nevertheless, productivity objectively exists. Some people/teams are more productive as others.

I suppose it would be simpler to compare productivity for people working on standard, "normalized" tasks, but often every other task a programmer is assigned is something different to the previous one, and different developers get different tasks.

It's difficult to measure productivity based on real-world work, but we can create an artificial experiment: give N programmers the same M "normal", everyday tasks and observe whether those using AI tools complete them more quickly.

This is somewhat similar to athletic competitions — artificial in nature, yet widely accepted as a way to compare runners’ performance.

[atavistically]

The outcome of complex systems cannot be trivially mapped to arbitrary components.

Focusing on the speed of outputting code or closing tickets is shortsighted from a software engineering standpoint.