[troupo]

> because the logical conclusion for that is that I've been deluding myself for the past two years and I'm effectively a victim of "magical thinking".

You may just as well have. I, for one, am absolutely ready to re-evaluate any and all approaches I have with AI to see if I am actually more productive or not.

But moreover, your own singular experience with your own code and projects may make you more productive. We don't know if it does because we don't have a baseline against which to measure.

But even moreover over that moreover is that we don't even have a question "does a single senior engineer's experience with his own code and approaches can be generalised over the entire population of programmers?" Skeptics say: no (and now have some proof of that). Optimists loudly say: yes, of course, and dismiss everyone who dares contradict out of hand.