The only plausible way to understand the 10x programmer is that this person is someone who accelerates productivity 10x, by inventiveness or whatever else. For

The only plausible way to understand the 10x programmer is that this person is someone who accelerates productivity 10x, by inventiveness or whatever else. For example, the person who wrote the first parser generator was a 10x programmer. He may have written less code altogether than the first client of the parser generator but he made generations of programmers more effective.