For years, startups obsessed over recruiting the mythical "10x engineer," a rare, hyper-productive individual capable of writing elegant code and solving architectural puzzles at ten times the rate of a median peer.

But a new report from AI coding startup Cursor suggests that the 10x era is over. It has been replaced by something more radical: the software industry’s top 1% of AI-active developers now write 46 times more AI-generated lines of code per day than the median active user.

“If you zoom out of the code writing process and think about the traditional product development lifecycle, it used to look like a conveyor belt," said Tido Carriero, Cursor’s vice president of engineering, who leads Cursor’s 200-person engineering and product team. The workflow went like this: A product manager drafted a spec, a senior engineer broke it down into architecture, and mid-level engineers handcrafted the code. Historically, that handcrafting absorbed roughly 80% of an organization’s R&D budget.

"That whole factory line has totally combusted," he said.

Lines of code written is a wildly imperfect metric for productivity. More code can mean more progress; it can also mean a bigger mess. But Cursor’s........

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