[loves_mangoes]

Sure, but I feel like that's trying to argue semantics without really changing the nature of the problem.

If the 'single thing' is really a whole compendium of integrated skills, then you can't easily teach it to people the same way that you can teach them regular expressions or parser combinators.

This sort of nebulous skill that very productive people have is also especially hard to transfer. You can spend a week taking math lessons from Terrence Tao and seeing how he works, but you will still not be Terrence Tao at the end of the week, no matter how many interesting mathematical tools and methods you learn.

My point is that there is No Silver Bullet that will consistently turn your 10 hour days in 1 hour day, or if there is one I have never seen it, and evidently no company has found one. Otherwise all of their employees would follow the same method and become 10x programmers. This has not happened.

It helps to learn popular patterns and algorithms, but I don't think learning more patterns will achieve the kind of order of magnitude improvement you're looking for.