There's substantial observable change pointing towards a universal software development speedup in the neighborhood of 2x. Much of it is internal company metrics, simply because it's meaningless in most enterprise contexts to count how much software is released. Things you can count, like the number of phone apps published, show the same pattern: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-a...

I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry.

If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an increase in apps being released, but an increase in product output from the big players too.

We should be, but I just don't know how you'd measure that in the short term. It's very hard to put a number to "how much software did Google release this month". You'd expect to see a substantial increase in revenue, but most kinds of software generate revenue only months down the line after adoption picks up, and few companies have even released Q1 results yet.

We've had LLMs for far longer than a quarter now; even if you think that only the recent ones have led to any improvement, you'd still expect to see something.

I’m skeptical that LLMs were capable of producing good software at all until Opus 4.5 in November, and they weren’t good enough to be in my personal workflow until 4.6 in February. I really do think the effects would have started only this quarter.