Flash memory life expectancy

[Z80]

I am wondering what the average life expectancy of the flash memory is.

Over the last couple of days I have noticed a certain random inexplicable flakiness of my firmware after running avrdude. This particular Leostick has been heavily used for development for the last 4 weeks (at which time it was brand new). I am guessing that I might have run avrdude 50 times or more in the course of a single day while debugging and developing my code, so it could very well have been re-programmed over 1000 times.

Today I bought another Leostick, flashed it with my code and magically all the weirdnesses were gone Substituting and re-flashing again the tired Leostick re-introduced the problems so it is not a software problem.

I thought these chips were good for 10,000 flashes, but this seems to not be the case. Does anyone else have any experience with heavy use of these things?

[Flymo]

My Leostick (back home) was still responding normally after some months of frequent tinkering when I left it. Don't think I'm up to 1000 hits, though! Probably under 100.
You're right, one would expect more than 1000, but I have had probs with expensive SSDs at some unknown number much less than 1000. Turns out my software was using part of the SSD for scratch rather than RAM, and pretty much beat it to death.
Flash memory is still pretty weird.