"Brooks Law" has not been broken but but we have found a silver bullet. Brooks said in 1986 "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Claude Code and somewhere around Opus 4.5 I believe my personal productivity improved by at least 1 order of magnitude for the first time in my 25 year career.
What about reliability and simplicity? First, what is your definition of productivity? Does it leans towards more output or more value.
Not my definition, the quote is from Brooks - “Productivity is stated in terms of debugged words per man-year.” He also writes about the limitations of this definition. But I can confirm, debugged words per man year has gone up more than 10x for many engineers.
In my experience reliability and simplicity have decreased, LOC for every feature is at least 2x what it was, more incidents than ever before. What kills me is if we just applied llm programming to the old ways of doing things and got our minor speedup but refined our approach, got ai to catch things we normally wouldn’t, did the extra refactor we normally wouldn’t we could increase reliability and simplicity. But management wants the velocity more than those things.