Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.
First counterexample that comes to mind: Rails vs 90s networked/shared line-of-business crud app development was a 10x factor. It also enabled a lot of internal tools that wouldn't have been worth doing without it. But after people's expectations adjusted it was just back on the treadmill. I don't think we've found a new steady-state yet, but I have some gut feeling guesses about where it's going to be.
For all the complaining we do about "enshittification", we (Hackernews, the broader industry, whatever), are perfectly willing to pay the price of stability and performance to get a little development speed. That's one prong of how enshittification happens. "I can make compromises in the quality of my product because time to market is the one thing, the only thing that matters in this move-fast-break-things economy—and pass my savings on to the customer (in the form of hidden costs)!"