We get a few not infinite. with a Claude 5x Max subscription I get 3-5 workable parallel agents that themselves spawn subagents to complete work in a ~3 hour window before tokens are spent. I imagine with 20x Max that could be increased to maybe 10 within a 5 hour window? so if you want infinite you're also talking infinite money. Working in parallel takes me personally to a higher plane of output than that of a 10x engineer as it pertains to fulfilling requirements.

Hasn't there always been a significant surplus of 10x performers in excess of positions that pay 10x?

Interesting question. We also heard about how "apps" were going to disappear, and we'd have an "AI" driven slurry that configured itself intelligently to whatever the task at hand required. Or in the alternative, a flood of really great and helpful "apps" would flood app stores, all vibe coded by non-technical people who had really great ideas. I myself wonder why we still have compilers, VMs and interpreters. Shouldn't "AI" produce a kind of object oriented, strictly typed, functional, array language PHP, where a developer could write whatever kind of syntax(es) in whatever mode. "AI" would just figure it out on the fly.

The answer to all of this not happening is that "AI" isn't that good, of course, and we're being sold a bill of goods.