This is true but depends where you get your information. Social media like Reddit, yeah, it's becoming just bots and bot comments and many of the humans don't even trust themselves to write longer than six words without prompting an llm. Real news sources where people put their government name to the article, less so, especially the more credible the source is.

>I suspect that what we're seeing instead of "more deliverables" we're seeing "same deliverables with less effort"

Even this I wonder to be true. What is less effort? I agree that ultimately the slow point is not the code generation. It is the bureacracy, interactions with stakeholders and collaborators, everything else that isn't getting faster of course.

Now how about the engineer. Is anyone actually working less? Like having less to do and just not working for 9/10ths the day? I don't think that is the case. The nature of software is actually that its productivity is a bit removed from business. You could be in charge of some product and there is literally endless work to be done either in features to potentially add and bugs that appear. Some more or less critical but that is the job really: infinite work. You can literally tinker forever. If anything this enables more tinkering and doing and getting caught up mucking around in the endless work slog. And of course none of this increased effort is going to move the needle on ultimately the sales job that pays the real bills of the software org, not engineering. The product can be junk if it can be spun to sell to enough people and make a very successful company, and plenty of excellent products do not sell and wither on the vine. And there is only so much market out there, only so many fish able to bite so many lines even if there is some product market fit.