The essay "No Silver Bullet" was first published by Dr. Fredrick Brooks in 1986, and republished in the 25th anniversary edition of his seminal collection 'The Mythical Man Month'. The essay questioned whether it was possible to achieve tenfold improvement in software engineering productivity within ten years.

This session offers insights on software engineering productivity from my own journey in computer programming, which began in 1976, leading to mainframe product development at IBM during the years Dr. Brooks first published his essay, then product engineering in ‘shrink wrap’ software and cloud native products, to current adventures in software engineering with Google’s Duet AI.

As a mainframe programmer I spent my time very differently than I do today. Software estimation and productivity metrics have evolved, but are elusive and even controversial. We've come from a mythical man month to mythical '10x programmers'. Will AI bring us 10x improvement? With the help of Google's Duet AI, we will explore whether we’ve finally found the silver bullet.