4 ms·

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all

by mrwrong 10mo ago

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good

adriand 10mo ago
Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading through scrum meetings. I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.
- beepbooptheory 10mo ago
  My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take? Do you still charge your clients the same?
  - adriand 10mo ago
    > They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;) In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%. It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".
    - WesleyJohnson 10mo ago
      Not to pick apart your analogy, but asserting that atheists haven't tried religion is misinformed.
      - timeon 10mo ago
        Brain-rot can be associated with heavy LLM usage.
    - beepbooptheory 10mo ago
      But then does this not give you pause, that it "feels religious"? Is there not some morsel of critical/rational interrogation on this? Aren't you worried about becoming perhaps too fundamentalist in your belief? To extend the analogy: why charge clients for your labor anymore, which Claude can supposedly do in a fraction of the time? Why not just ask if they have heard the good word, so to speak?
    - jakebasile 10mo ago
      So, you say that AI has made you "ridiculously faster", but then admit you've always been terrible at estimating how long something would take?
    - bonesss 10mo ago
      Religions are about faith, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Engineering output is tangible and measurable, objectively verifiable and readily quantifiable (both locally and in terms of profits). Full evidence, testable assertions, no faith required. Here we have claims of objective results, but also admissions we’re not even tracking estimations and are terrible at making them when we do. People are notoriously bad at estimating actual time spent versus output, particularly when dealing with unwanted work. We’re missing the fundamental criteria of assessment, and there are known biases unaccounted for. Output in LOC has never been the issue, copy and paste handles that just fine. TCO and holistic velocity after a few years is a separate matter. Masterful orchestration of agents could include estimation and tracking tasks with minimal overhead. That’s not what we’re seeing though… Someone who has even a 20% better method for deck construction is gonna show me some timetables, some billed projects, and a very fancy new car. If accepting Mothra as my lord and saviour is a prerequisite to pierce an otherwise impenetrable veil of ontological obfuscation in order to see the unseeable? That deck might not be as cheap as it sounds, one way or the other. I’m getting a nice learning and productivity bump from LLMs, there are incredible capabilities available. But premature optimization is still premature, and claims of silver bullets are yet to be demonstrated.
- mrwrong 10mo ago
  this is just not a very interesting way to talk about technology. I'm glad it feels like a religious experience to you, I don't care about that. I care about reality
  - coderatlarge 10mo ago
    it seems to me if these things were real and repeatable there would be published traces that show the exact interactions that led to a specific output and the cost in time and money to get there. do such things exist?
- no_wizard 10mo ago
  If your work maps exceedingly well to the technology it is true, it goes much faster. Doubly so when you have enough experience and understanding of things to find its errors or suboptimal approaches and adjust it that much faster. The second you get to a place where the mapping isn’t there though, it goes off rails quickly. Not everyone programs in such a way that they may ever experience this but I have, as a Staff engineer at a large firm, run into this again and again. It’s great for greenfield projects that follow CRUD patterns though.
- wilsonnb3 10mo ago
  Assuming 40 hours a week of work time, you’re claiming a ~25x speed up, which is laughably absurd to me. It will take you 2.5 months to accomplish what would have taken you five years, that is the kind of productivity increase you’re describing. It doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not sure that going from assembly to python would even have such a ludicrous productivity enhancement.
klank4 10mo ago
What's worked best with Gemini such I made a DSL that transpiles to C with CUDA support to train small models in about 3 hours... (all programs must run against an image data set, must only generate embeddings) Do not; vibe code from top down (ex. Make me a UI with React, with these buttons and these behaviors to each button) Do not; chat casually with it. (ex. I think it would look better if the button was green) Do; constrain phrasing to the next data transform goal (ex. You must add a function to change all words that start with lowercase to start with uppercase) Do; vibe code bottom up (ex. You must generate a file with a function to open a plaintext file and appropriate tests; now you must add a function to count all words that begin with "f") Do; stick to must/should/may (ex. You must extend the code with this next function) Do; constrain it to mathematical abstractions (ex. sys prompt: You must not use loops, you must only use recursion and functional paradigms. You must not make up abstractions and stick to mathematical objects and known algorithms) Do; constrain it to one file per type and function. This makes it quick to review, regenerate only what needs to change. Using those patterns, Gemini 2.5 and 3 have cranked out banging code with little wandering off in the weeds and hallucinating. Programming has been mired in made up semantics of the individual coder for the luls, to create mystique and obfuscate the truth to ensure job security; end of the day it's matrix math and state sync between memory and display.
- pdimitar 10mo ago
  Awesome comment, thank you. No idea why it was flagged as dead. Vouched for it to not be.
- GrinningFool 10mo ago
  THis is remarkably similar to the process we had to follow a couple of decades ago, when offshoring to IT mills: spell out every little detail in small steps, iterate often, and you'll usually get most of what you want.
- _superposition_ 10mo ago
  This. I find constraints to be very important. It's fairly obvious an llm can tackle a class or function. It's still up to the human to string it all together. I'm not quite sure how long that will last though. Seems more of an engineering problem to me. At the end of the day you absolutely can get good outputs from these things if you provide the proper input. Everything else is orchestration.
stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
Nobody had a robust, empirical metric of programmer productivity. Nobody. Ticket count, function points, LoC, and others tell you nothing about the fitness of the product. It’s all feels.
- mrwrong 10mo ago
  ok, but there's a spectrum between fully reproducible empirical evidence and divine revelation. I'm not convinced it's impossible to measure productivity in a meaningful way, even if it isn't perfect. it at least seems better to try than... whatever this is
nasmorn 10mo ago
Just as an aside I also think I am way more productive now but a really convincing datapoint would be someone who does project work and now has 5x the hourly rate they had last year. If there are not plenty of people like this, it cannot be 10x
- thfuran 10mo ago
  That's not a very convincing argument. Even if you can do 10x the work, that doesn't necessarily mean you can easily find customers ready to pay 5x the hourly rate.
  - nasmorn 10mo ago
    Not everyone bills hourly. I mostly do fixed price contracts
  - agent281 10mo ago
    I understood their comment as going from $100 / hour * 100 hours to $100 / hour * 500 hours not to $500 / hour * 100 hours
    - thfuran 10mo ago
      But it specifically mentions having 5x the previous hourly rate.
    - nasmorn 10mo ago
      Yeah the last one. The others would require 5x deal flow which LLMs might not help deliver at all. But the last one should exist for people if 10x is true. Not every client can have already fully price in LLM improvements, people have contracts negotiated pre LLM. I have not heard of this though so I have to remain sceptical

by mrwrong 10mo ago

adriand 10mo ago

Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading through scrum meetings. I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.

beepbooptheory 10mo ago
My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take? Do you still charge your clients the same?
- adriand 10mo ago
  > They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;) In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%. It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".
  - WesleyJohnson 10mo ago
    Not to pick apart your analogy, but asserting that atheists haven't tried religion is misinformed.
    - timeon 10mo ago
      Brain-rot can be associated with heavy LLM usage.
  - beepbooptheory 10mo ago
    But then does this not give you pause, that it "feels religious"? Is there not some morsel of critical/rational interrogation on this? Aren't you worried about becoming perhaps too fundamentalist in your belief? To extend the analogy: why charge clients for your labor anymore, which Claude can supposedly do in a fraction of the time? Why not just ask if they have heard the good word, so to speak?
  - jakebasile 10mo ago
    So, you say that AI has made you "ridiculously faster", but then admit you've always been terrible at estimating how long something would take?
  - bonesss 10mo ago
    Religions are about faith, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Engineering output is tangible and measurable, objectively verifiable and readily quantifiable (both locally and in terms of profits). Full evidence, testable assertions, no faith required. Here we have claims of objective results, but also admissions we’re not even tracking estimations and are terrible at making them when we do. People are notoriously bad at estimating actual time spent versus output, particularly when dealing with unwanted work. We’re missing the fundamental criteria of assessment, and there are known biases unaccounted for. Output in LOC has never been the issue, copy and paste handles that just fine. TCO and holistic velocity after a few years is a separate matter. Masterful orchestration of agents could include estimation and tracking tasks with minimal overhead. That’s not what we’re seeing though… Someone who has even a 20% better method for deck construction is gonna show me some timetables, some billed projects, and a very fancy new car. If accepting Mothra as my lord and saviour is a prerequisite to pierce an otherwise impenetrable veil of ontological obfuscation in order to see the unseeable? That deck might not be as cheap as it sounds, one way or the other. I’m getting a nice learning and productivity bump from LLMs, there are incredible capabilities available. But premature optimization is still premature, and claims of silver bullets are yet to be demonstrated.
mrwrong 10mo ago
this is just not a very interesting way to talk about technology. I'm glad it feels like a religious experience to you, I don't care about that. I care about reality
- coderatlarge 10mo ago
  it seems to me if these things were real and repeatable there would be published traces that show the exact interactions that led to a specific output and the cost in time and money to get there. do such things exist?
no_wizard 10mo ago
If your work maps exceedingly well to the technology it is true, it goes much faster. Doubly so when you have enough experience and understanding of things to find its errors or suboptimal approaches and adjust it that much faster. The second you get to a place where the mapping isn’t there though, it goes off rails quickly. Not everyone programs in such a way that they may ever experience this but I have, as a Staff engineer at a large firm, run into this again and again. It’s great for greenfield projects that follow CRUD patterns though.
wilsonnb3 10mo ago
Assuming 40 hours a week of work time, you’re claiming a ~25x speed up, which is laughably absurd to me. It will take you 2.5 months to accomplish what would have taken you five years, that is the kind of productivity increase you’re describing. It doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not sure that going from assembly to python would even have such a ludicrous productivity enhancement.

klank4 10mo ago

What's worked best with Gemini such I made a DSL that transpiles to C with CUDA support to train small models in about 3 hours... (all programs must run against an image data set, must only generate embeddings) Do not; vibe code from top down (ex. Make me a UI with React, with these buttons and these behaviors to each button) Do not; chat casually with it. (ex. I think it would look better if the button was green) Do; constrain phrasing to the next data transform goal (ex. You must add a function to change all words that start with lowercase to start with uppercase) Do; vibe code bottom up (ex. You must generate a file with a function to open a plaintext file and appropriate tests; now you must add a function to count all words that begin with "f") Do; stick to must/should/may (ex. You must extend the code with this next function) Do; constrain it to mathematical abstractions (ex. sys prompt: You must not use loops, you must only use recursion and functional paradigms. You must not make up abstractions and stick to mathematical objects and known algorithms) Do; constrain it to one file per type and function. This makes it quick to review, regenerate only what needs to change. Using those patterns, Gemini 2.5 and 3 have cranked out banging code with little wandering off in the weeds and hallucinating. Programming has been mired in made up semantics of the individual coder for the luls, to create mystique and obfuscate the truth to ensure job security; end of the day it's matrix math and state sync between memory and display.

pdimitar 10mo ago
Awesome comment, thank you. No idea why it was flagged as dead. Vouched for it to not be.
GrinningFool 10mo ago
THis is remarkably similar to the process we had to follow a couple of decades ago, when offshoring to IT mills: spell out every little detail in small steps, iterate often, and you'll usually get most of what you want.
_superposition_ 10mo ago
This. I find constraints to be very important. It's fairly obvious an llm can tackle a class or function. It's still up to the human to string it all together. I'm not quite sure how long that will last though. Seems more of an engineering problem to me. At the end of the day you absolutely can get good outputs from these things if you provide the proper input. Everything else is orchestration.

stocksinsmocks 10mo ago

Nobody had a robust, empirical metric of programmer productivity. Nobody. Ticket count, function points, LoC, and others tell you nothing about the fitness of the product. It’s all feels.

mrwrong 10mo ago
ok, but there's a spectrum between fully reproducible empirical evidence and divine revelation. I'm not convinced it's impossible to measure productivity in a meaningful way, even if it isn't perfect. it at least seems better to try than... whatever this is

nasmorn 10mo ago

Just as an aside I also think I am way more productive now but a really convincing datapoint would be someone who does project work and now has 5x the hourly rate they had last year. If there are not plenty of people like this, it cannot be 10x

thfuran 10mo ago
That's not a very convincing argument. Even if you can do 10x the work, that doesn't necessarily mean you can easily find customers ready to pay 5x the hourly rate.
- nasmorn 10mo ago
  Not everyone bills hourly. I mostly do fixed price contracts
- agent281 10mo ago
  I understood their comment as going from $100 / hour * 100 hours to $100 / hour * 500 hours not to $500 / hour * 100 hours
  - thfuran 10mo ago
    But it specifically mentions having 5x the previous hourly rate.
  - nasmorn 10mo ago
    Yeah the last one. The others would require 5x deal flow which LLMs might not help deliver at all. But the last one should exist for people if 10x is true. Not every client can have already fully price in LLM improvements, people have contracts negotiated pre LLM. I have not heard of this though so I have to remain sceptical