Great article and I was having very similar thoughts with regards to this productivity study and the "Programming as Theory Building" paper. I'm starting to be convinced that if you are the original author of a program and still have the program's context in the head, you are the asymptote to which any and all AI systems will approach but never surpass: maybe not in terms of raw coding speed, but in terms of understanding the program, its vision of development, its deficiencies and hacks, its context, its users and what they want, the broader culture the program exists in, etc.

I really like how the author then brought up the point that for most daily work we don't have the theory built, even a small fraction of it, and that this may or may not change the equation.