[js8]

They also say "Wider adoption of AI has made it more difficult to measure task-level productivity"

I think there is a simple reason for that. If you automate something, you make the measureable/predictable thing faster. So the hard to measure/predict part of the job will take more share of the time, and overall difficulty to measure/predict goes up.

I think this is what happened with Agile Scrum - as developers became more productive (for unrelated reasons, two main sources of SW developer productivity before AI were compilers and open source), the bureacracy (amount of meetings) increased, because the ratio of hard to measure vs easy to measure went up. Bureacracy is hard to measure, so it went up (as a share of work). I expect this only getting worse with more automation, such as AI. So I predict an increase in share of bureacracy compared to pre-AI world.

Either way, IMHO main point is automation has the opposite effect on human job predictability, it lowers it. Tasks we can easily automate are those that are easy to predict.

[nikau]

I've held this stance on agile for a long time - it coincided with mainstream adoption of ssds, windows with memory protection and google search - all of which sped delivery despite agile, not because of agile.