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My goal here was not to publicly call out any specific individual or article. I don't want to make enemies and I don't want to be cast as dunking on someone. I

My goal here was not to publicly call out any specific individual or article. I don't want to make enemies and I don't want to be cast as dunking on someone. I get that that opens me up to criticism that I'm fighting a strawman, I accept that. Your article does not specifically say 10x, but it does say this: > Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged. > “I’m sipping rocket fuel right now,” a friend tells me. “The folks on my team who aren’t embracing AI? It’s like they’re standing still.” He’s not bullshitting me. He doesn’t work in SFBA. He’s got no reason to lie. That's not quantifying it specifically enough to say "10x", but it is saying no uncertain terms that AI engineers are moving fast and everyone else is standing still by comparison. Your article was indeed one of the ones I specifically wanted to respond to as the language directly contributed to the anxiety I described here. It made me worry that maybe I was standing still. To me, the engineer you described as sipping rocket fuel is an example both of the "degrees of separation" concept (it confuses me you are pointing to a third party and saying they are trustworthy, why not simply describe your workflow?), and the idea that a quick burst of productivity can feel huge but it just doesn't scale in my experience. Again, can you tell me about what you've done to no longer have any hallucinations? I'm fully open to learning here. As I stated in the article, I did my best to give full AI agent coding a try, I'm open to being proven wrong and adjusting my approach.

tptacek 1y ago
Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not.
- coltonv 1y ago
  > Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not. I distinctly did not say that. I said your article was one of the ones that made me feel anxious. And it's one of the ones that spurred me to write this article. I demonstrated how your language implies a massive productivity boost from AI. Does it not? Is this not the entire point of what you wrote? That engineers who aren't using AI are crazy (literally the title) because they are missing out on all this "rocket fuel" productivity? The difference between rocket fuel and standing still has to be a pretty big improvement. The points I make here still apply, there is not some secret well of super-productivity sitting out in the open that luddites are just too grumpy to pick up and use. Those who feel they have gotten massive productivity boosts are being tricked by occasional, rare boosts in productivity. You said you solved hallucinations, could you share some of how you did that?
  - tptacek 1y ago
    I asked for an example of one of the articles you'd read that said that LLMs were turning ordinary developers into 10x developers. You cited my article. My article says nothing of the sort; I find the notion of "10x developers" repellant.
    - Quarrelsome 1y ago
      how much faster does an engine on rocket fuel go, than one not on rocket fuel? The article in question[0] has the literal tag line: > My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts how much saner is someone who isn't nuts to someone who is nuts? 10x saner? What do the specific numbers matter given you're not writing a paper? You're enjoying the click bait benefits of using strong language and then acting offended when someone calls you out on it. Yes, maybe you didn't literally say "10x" but you said or quoted things in exactly that same ballpark and its worthy of a counter point like the OP has provided. They're both interesting articles with strong opinions that make the world a more interesting place so idk why you're trying to disown the strength with which you wrote your article. [0] : https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
      - tptacek 1y ago
        I'm not complaining about "strong language", I'm saying: my post didn't say anything about "10x developers", and was just cited to me as the source of this post's claims about 10x'ing. I'm not offended at all. I'm saying: no, I'm not a valid cite for that idea. If the author wants to come back and say "10x developer", a term they used twenty five times in this piece, was just a rhetorical flourish, something they conjured up themselves in their head, that's great! That would resolve this small dispute neatly. Unfortunately: you can't speak for them.
        Quarrelsome 1y ago
        10x is a meme in our industry that relates to developer productivity and I think it well reflects the sort of productivity gain that someone would be "nuts" to be skeptical about. You might not have specifically said "10x" but I imagine many people left your article believing that agentic AI is the "next 10x" productivity boost. They used it 25 times in their piece and in your piece stated that being interested in "the craft" is something people should do in their own time from now on. Strongly implying, if not outright stating; that the processes and practices we've refined for the past 70 years of software engineering need to move aside for the next hotness that has only been out for 6 months. Sure you never said "10x", but to me it read entirely like you're doing the "10x" dance. It was a good article and it definitely has inspired me to check it out.
kasey_junk 1y ago
I believe that quote in Thomas’ blog can be attributed to me. I’ve at least said something near enough to him that I don’t mind claiming it. I _never_ made the claim that you could call that 10x productivity improvement. I’m hesitant to categorize productivity in software in numeric terms as it’s such a nuanced concept. But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t. I mentioned in another comment the major flaw in your productivity calculation, is that you aren’t accounting for the work that wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise. That’s where my improvements are almost universally coming from. I can improve the codebase in ways that weren’t justifiable before in places that do not suffer from the coordination costs you rightly point out. I no longer feel like my peers are standing still, because they’ve nearly uniformly adopted ai tools. And again, you rightly point out, there isn’t much of a learning curve. If you could develop before them you can figure out how to improve with them. I found it easier than learning vim. As for hallucinations I don’t experience them effectively _ever_. And I do let agents mess with terraform code (in code bases where I can prevent state manipulation or infrastructure changes outside of the agents control). I don’t have any hints on how. I’m using a pretty vanilla Claude code setup. But im not sure how an agent that can write and run compile/test loops could hallucinate.
- claytongulick 1y ago
  > But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t. And this is the problem. Masterful developers are the ones you pay to reduce lines of code, not create them.
  - kasey_junk 1y ago
    Every. Single. Time. You say you get productivity gains from ai tools on the internet someone will tell you that you weren’t good at your job before the ai tooling. Perhaps, start from the assumption that I have in fact spent a fair bit of time doing this job at a high level. Where does that mental exercise take you with regard to your own position on ai tools. In fact, you don’t have to assume I’m qualified to speak on the subject. Your retort assumes that _everyone_ who gets improvement is bad at this. Assume any random proponent isn’t.

tptacek 1y ago

Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not.

coltonv 1y ago
> Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not. I distinctly did not say that. I said your article was one of the ones that made me feel anxious. And it's one of the ones that spurred me to write this article. I demonstrated how your language implies a massive productivity boost from AI. Does it not? Is this not the entire point of what you wrote? That engineers who aren't using AI are crazy (literally the title) because they are missing out on all this "rocket fuel" productivity? The difference between rocket fuel and standing still has to be a pretty big improvement. The points I make here still apply, there is not some secret well of super-productivity sitting out in the open that luddites are just too grumpy to pick up and use. Those who feel they have gotten massive productivity boosts are being tricked by occasional, rare boosts in productivity. You said you solved hallucinations, could you share some of how you did that?
- tptacek 1y ago
  I asked for an example of one of the articles you'd read that said that LLMs were turning ordinary developers into 10x developers. You cited my article. My article says nothing of the sort; I find the notion of "10x developers" repellant.
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    how much faster does an engine on rocket fuel go, than one not on rocket fuel? The article in question[0] has the literal tag line: > My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts how much saner is someone who isn't nuts to someone who is nuts? 10x saner? What do the specific numbers matter given you're not writing a paper? You're enjoying the click bait benefits of using strong language and then acting offended when someone calls you out on it. Yes, maybe you didn't literally say "10x" but you said or quoted things in exactly that same ballpark and its worthy of a counter point like the OP has provided. They're both interesting articles with strong opinions that make the world a more interesting place so idk why you're trying to disown the strength with which you wrote your article. [0] : https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
    - tptacek 1y ago
      I'm not complaining about "strong language", I'm saying: my post didn't say anything about "10x developers", and was just cited to me as the source of this post's claims about 10x'ing. I'm not offended at all. I'm saying: no, I'm not a valid cite for that idea. If the author wants to come back and say "10x developer", a term they used twenty five times in this piece, was just a rhetorical flourish, something they conjured up themselves in their head, that's great! That would resolve this small dispute neatly. Unfortunately: you can't speak for them.
      - Quarrelsome 1y ago
        10x is a meme in our industry that relates to developer productivity and I think it well reflects the sort of productivity gain that someone would be "nuts" to be skeptical about. You might not have specifically said "10x" but I imagine many people left your article believing that agentic AI is the "next 10x" productivity boost. They used it 25 times in their piece and in your piece stated that being interested in "the craft" is something people should do in their own time from now on. Strongly implying, if not outright stating; that the processes and practices we've refined for the past 70 years of software engineering need to move aside for the next hotness that has only been out for 6 months. Sure you never said "10x", but to me it read entirely like you're doing the "10x" dance. It was a good article and it definitely has inspired me to check it out.

kasey_junk 1y ago

I believe that quote in Thomas’ blog can be attributed to me. I’ve at least said something near enough to him that I don’t mind claiming it. I _never_ made the claim that you could call that 10x productivity improvement. I’m hesitant to categorize productivity in software in numeric terms as it’s such a nuanced concept. But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t. I mentioned in another comment the major flaw in your productivity calculation, is that you aren’t accounting for the work that wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise. That’s where my improvements are almost universally coming from. I can improve the codebase in ways that weren’t justifiable before in places that do not suffer from the coordination costs you rightly point out. I no longer feel like my peers are standing still, because they’ve nearly uniformly adopted ai tools. And again, you rightly point out, there isn’t much of a learning curve. If you could develop before them you can figure out how to improve with them. I found it easier than learning vim. As for hallucinations I don’t experience them effectively _ever_. And I do let agents mess with terraform code (in code bases where I can prevent state manipulation or infrastructure changes outside of the agents control). I don’t have any hints on how. I’m using a pretty vanilla Claude code setup. But im not sure how an agent that can write and run compile/test loops could hallucinate.

claytongulick 1y ago
> But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t. And this is the problem. Masterful developers are the ones you pay to reduce lines of code, not create them.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  Every. Single. Time. You say you get productivity gains from ai tools on the internet someone will tell you that you weren’t good at your job before the ai tooling. Perhaps, start from the assumption that I have in fact spent a fair bit of time doing this job at a high level. Where does that mental exercise take you with regard to your own position on ai tools. In fact, you don’t have to assume I’m qualified to speak on the subject. Your retort assumes that _everyone_ who gets improvement is bad at this. Assume any random proponent isn’t.