You can - but not on the level of a single developer and you cannot use those measures to manage productivity of a specific dev.

For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics.

You shouldn’t really compare teams but it also is possible if you know what teams are doing.

If you are some disconnected manager that thinks he can make decisions or improvements reducing things to single numbers - yeah that’s not possible.

I knew a superstar developer who worked on reports in an SQL tool. In the company metrics, the developer scored 420 points per month, the second developer scored 60 points. “Please learn how to score more points from the leader”, the boss would say.

The superstar developer’s secret… he would send blank reports to clients (who would only realize it days later, and someone else would end up redoing the report), and he would score many more points without doing anything. I’ve seen this happen a lot in many different companies. As a friend of mine used to say, “it’s very rare, but it happens all the time.”

I have no doubt that AI can help developers, but I don’t trust the metrics of the CEO or people who work on AI, because they are too involved in the subject.

At scale you can do this in a bunch of interesting ways. For example, you could measure "amount of time between opening a crash log and writing the first character of a new change" across 10,000s of engineers. Yes, each individual data point is highly messy. Alice might start coding as a means of investigation. Bob might like to think about the crash over dinner. Carol might get a really hard bug while David gets a really easy one. But at scale you can see how changes in the tools change this metric.

None of this works to evaluate individuals or even teams. But it can be effective at evaluating tools.

You can come up with measures for it and then watch them, that’s for sure.