Code-generation velocity, and the absolute number of lines churned are 2 metrics AI tools can irrefutably benchmaxx, so the vendors highlight them.

Oh absolutely - the old saying about only having a hammer and seeing each problem as a nail applies.

On the positive side, they've decided to come down from "superintelligence", "superchanging workflows" and other bullshit to the actual feature - 3x speed of text generation. Which is not quite the problem that needed to be solved in software engineering, but as you said yourself...