4 ms·

I can see why people are skeptical devs can be 10x as productive. But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.

J_Shelby_J 9mo ago
Id wager my life savings that devs aren’t even 1.5x more productive using these tools.
- zer00eyz 9mo ago
  Dead wrong. Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review. Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.
  - newAccount2025 9mo ago
    The matrix framing is a very nice and way to put it. This morning I asked my assistant to code up a nice debugger for a particular flow in my application. It’s much better than I would have had time/patience to build myself for a nice-to-have.
  - rubyn00bie 9mo ago
    I sort of have a different view of that time matrix. If AI is only able to help me do tasks that are of low value, where I previously wouldn’t have bothered—- is it really saving me anything? Before where I’d simply ignore auxiliary tasks, and focus on what matters, I’m now constantly detoured with them thinking “it’ll only take ten minutes.” I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capable of writing small pieces well. More complicated asks tend to produce unnecessarily complicated solutions, ones that may “work,” on the surface, but don’t hold up in practice. I’ve seen a large increase in small bugs with more AI coding assistance. When I write code, I want to write it and forget about it. As a result, I’ve written a LOT of code which has gone on to work for years without touching it. The amount of time I spent writing it is inconsequential in every sense. I personally have not found AI capable of producing code like that (yet, as all things, that could change). Does AI help with some stuff? Sure. I always forget common patterns in Terraform because I don’t often have to use it. Writing some initial resources and asking it to “make it normal,” is helpful. That does save time. Asking it to write a gen server correctly, is an act of self-harm because it fundamentally does not understand concurrency in Erlang/BEAM/OTP. It very much looks like it does, but it 100% does not. tldr; I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
    - zer00eyz 9mo ago
      > are only capable of writing small pieces well. It excels at this, and if you have it deeply integrated into your workflow and IDE/dev env the loop should feel more like pair programing, like tennis, than it should feel like its doing everything for you. > I also primarily write Elixir, I would also venture that it has less to do with the language (it is a factor) and more to do with what you are working on. Domain will matter in terms of sample size (code) and understanding (language to support). There could be 1000s of examples in its training data of what you want, but if no one wrote a commment that accurately describes what that does... > I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees. This is spot on. I stopped thinking of it as "AI" and started thinking of it as "power tools". Useful, and like a power tool you should be cautious because there is danger there... It isnt smart, it's not doing anything that isnt in its training data, but there is a lot there, everything, and it can do some basic synthesis.
  - xeromal 9mo ago
    Yup, I've already run like 6 of my personal projects including 1 for my wife that I had lost interest in. For a few dollars, these are now actually running and being used by my family. These tools are a great enabler for people like me. lol I used to complain when my friends and family gave me ideas for something they wanted or needed help with because I was just too tired to do it after a day's work. Now I can sit next to them and we can pair program an entire idea in an evening.
    - Micheasherman 8mo ago
      If it is 20% slower for you to write with AI, but you are not stressed out and enjoy it so you actually code then the AI is a win and you are more productive with it. I think that's what is missing from the conversation. It doesn't make developers faster, nor better, but it can automate what some devs detest and feel burned out having to write and for those devs it is a big win. If you can productively code 40 hours a week with AI and only 30 hours a week without AI then the AI doesn't have to be as good, just close to as good.
      - xeromal 8mo ago
        I'm in agreeance with you 100%. A lot of my job is coming into projects that have been running already and having to understand how the code was written, the patterns, and everything else. Generating a project with an LLM feels like doing the same thing. It's not going to be a perfect code base but it's enough. Last night I was working on trying to find a correlation between some malicious users we had found and information we could glean from our internet traffic and I was able to crunch a ton of data automatically without having to do it myself. I had a hunch but it made it verifiable and then I was able to use the queries it had used to verify myself. Saved me probably 4 or 5 hours and I was able to wash the dishes.
- leptons 9mo ago
  It probably depends on the developer, and how much slop/bugs is willing to be tolerated.
- mattlondon 9mo ago
  Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession. FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc. I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.
  - 9dev 9mo ago
    I absolutely share your feelings. And I realise I’m way less hesitant to pick up the dredge tasks; migrating to new major versions of dependencies, adding missing edge case tests, adding CRUD endpoints, nasty refactorings, all these things you usually postpone or go on procrastination sprees on HN are suddenly very simple undertakings that you can trivially review.
seff 9mo ago
I view the current tools as more of a multiplier of base skill. A 1x engineer may become a 5x engineer, but a -1x will also produce 5x more bad code.
- Retric 9mo ago
  Several experiments have shown quality of output at every skill level drops. In many cases the quantity of output is good enough to compensate, but quality is extremely difficult to improve at scale. Beefing up QA to handle significantly more code of noticeably lower quality only goes so far.
rirze 9mo ago
Like others are saying, AI will accelerate the gap between competent devs and mediocre devs. It is a multiplier. AI cannot replace fundamentals, at least not a good helmsman with a good rational, detail-oriented mind. Having fundamentals (skill & knowledge) + using AI will be the cheat code in the next 10 years. The only historical analogue of this is perhaps differentiating a good project manager from an excellent one. No matter how advanced, technology will not substitute for competence.
bodge5000 9mo ago
I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that. I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on
- scotty79 9mo ago
  Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world? Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
  - Krei-se 9mo ago
    Because its a clone.
  - bodge5000 9mo ago
    I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.
    - scotty79 9mo ago
      Double your estimate and switch the unit or time to next larger one. That's how programmers time estimate tend to be. So two months and I'm right there with you.
gtowey 9mo ago
At the company I work for, despite pushing widespread adoption, I have seen exactly a zero percent increase in the rate at which major projects get shipped.
- qualifck 9mo ago
  This is what keeps getting me. People here keep posting benchmarks, bragging about 5x, 10x, 20x. None of the companies we work with are putting anything faster. The evangelist response is to call it a skill issue, but looking around it seems like no one anywhere is actually pushing out new products meaningfully faster.
  - gtowey 8mo ago
    I think it shows the barrier to building software quickly was never about how fast you can write the code. Maybe at a startup it is, but for any established company I find most of the friction is systemic management issues.
    - Micheasherman 8mo ago
      Well, considering there are coders who type under 30 WPM and are senior level programmers I would have thought people realized that years ago. Oh well
rsynnott 9mo ago
> But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools. If this were true, we should be seeing evidence of it by now, either in vastly increased output by companies (and open source projects, and indie game devs, etc), or in really _dramatic_ job losses. This is assuming a sensible definition of 'productive'; if you mean 'lines of code' or 'self-assessment', then, eh, maybe, but those aren't useful metrics of productivity.

J_Shelby_J 9mo ago

Id wager my life savings that devs aren’t even 1.5x more productive using these tools.

zer00eyz 9mo ago
Dead wrong. Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review. Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.
- newAccount2025 9mo ago
  The matrix framing is a very nice and way to put it. This morning I asked my assistant to code up a nice debugger for a particular flow in my application. It’s much better than I would have had time/patience to build myself for a nice-to-have.
- rubyn00bie 9mo ago
  I sort of have a different view of that time matrix. If AI is only able to help me do tasks that are of low value, where I previously wouldn’t have bothered—- is it really saving me anything? Before where I’d simply ignore auxiliary tasks, and focus on what matters, I’m now constantly detoured with them thinking “it’ll only take ten minutes.” I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capable of writing small pieces well. More complicated asks tend to produce unnecessarily complicated solutions, ones that may “work,” on the surface, but don’t hold up in practice. I’ve seen a large increase in small bugs with more AI coding assistance. When I write code, I want to write it and forget about it. As a result, I’ve written a LOT of code which has gone on to work for years without touching it. The amount of time I spent writing it is inconsequential in every sense. I personally have not found AI capable of producing code like that (yet, as all things, that could change). Does AI help with some stuff? Sure. I always forget common patterns in Terraform because I don’t often have to use it. Writing some initial resources and asking it to “make it normal,” is helpful. That does save time. Asking it to write a gen server correctly, is an act of self-harm because it fundamentally does not understand concurrency in Erlang/BEAM/OTP. It very much looks like it does, but it 100% does not. tldr; I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
  - zer00eyz 9mo ago
    > are only capable of writing small pieces well. It excels at this, and if you have it deeply integrated into your workflow and IDE/dev env the loop should feel more like pair programing, like tennis, than it should feel like its doing everything for you. > I also primarily write Elixir, I would also venture that it has less to do with the language (it is a factor) and more to do with what you are working on. Domain will matter in terms of sample size (code) and understanding (language to support). There could be 1000s of examples in its training data of what you want, but if no one wrote a commment that accurately describes what that does... > I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees. This is spot on. I stopped thinking of it as "AI" and started thinking of it as "power tools". Useful, and like a power tool you should be cautious because there is danger there... It isnt smart, it's not doing anything that isnt in its training data, but there is a lot there, everything, and it can do some basic synthesis.
- xeromal 9mo ago
  Yup, I've already run like 6 of my personal projects including 1 for my wife that I had lost interest in. For a few dollars, these are now actually running and being used by my family. These tools are a great enabler for people like me. lol I used to complain when my friends and family gave me ideas for something they wanted or needed help with because I was just too tired to do it after a day's work. Now I can sit next to them and we can pair program an entire idea in an evening.
  - Micheasherman 8mo ago
    If it is 20% slower for you to write with AI, but you are not stressed out and enjoy it so you actually code then the AI is a win and you are more productive with it. I think that's what is missing from the conversation. It doesn't make developers faster, nor better, but it can automate what some devs detest and feel burned out having to write and for those devs it is a big win. If you can productively code 40 hours a week with AI and only 30 hours a week without AI then the AI doesn't have to be as good, just close to as good.
    - xeromal 8mo ago
      I'm in agreeance with you 100%. A lot of my job is coming into projects that have been running already and having to understand how the code was written, the patterns, and everything else. Generating a project with an LLM feels like doing the same thing. It's not going to be a perfect code base but it's enough. Last night I was working on trying to find a correlation between some malicious users we had found and information we could glean from our internet traffic and I was able to crunch a ton of data automatically without having to do it myself. I had a hunch but it made it verifiable and then I was able to use the queries it had used to verify myself. Saved me probably 4 or 5 hours and I was able to wash the dishes.
leptons 9mo ago
It probably depends on the developer, and how much slop/bugs is willing to be tolerated.
mattlondon 9mo ago
Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession. FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc. I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.
- 9dev 9mo ago
  I absolutely share your feelings. And I realise I’m way less hesitant to pick up the dredge tasks; migrating to new major versions of dependencies, adding missing edge case tests, adding CRUD endpoints, nasty refactorings, all these things you usually postpone or go on procrastination sprees on HN are suddenly very simple undertakings that you can trivially review.

seff 9mo ago

I view the current tools as more of a multiplier of base skill. A 1x engineer may become a 5x engineer, but a -1x will also produce 5x more bad code.

Retric 9mo ago
Several experiments have shown quality of output at every skill level drops. In many cases the quantity of output is good enough to compensate, but quality is extremely difficult to improve at scale. Beefing up QA to handle significantly more code of noticeably lower quality only goes so far.

rirze 9mo ago

Like others are saying, AI will accelerate the gap between competent devs and mediocre devs. It is a multiplier. AI cannot replace fundamentals, at least not a good helmsman with a good rational, detail-oriented mind. Having fundamentals (skill & knowledge) + using AI will be the cheat code in the next 10 years. The only historical analogue of this is perhaps differentiating a good project manager from an excellent one. No matter how advanced, technology will not substitute for competence.

bodge5000 9mo ago

I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that. I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on

scotty79 9mo ago
Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world? Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
- Krei-se 9mo ago
  Because its a clone.
- bodge5000 9mo ago
  I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.
  - scotty79 9mo ago
    Double your estimate and switch the unit or time to next larger one. That's how programmers time estimate tend to be. So two months and I'm right there with you.

gtowey 9mo ago

At the company I work for, despite pushing widespread adoption, I have seen exactly a zero percent increase in the rate at which major projects get shipped.

qualifck 9mo ago
This is what keeps getting me. People here keep posting benchmarks, bragging about 5x, 10x, 20x. None of the companies we work with are putting anything faster. The evangelist response is to call it a skill issue, but looking around it seems like no one anywhere is actually pushing out new products meaningfully faster.
- gtowey 8mo ago
  I think it shows the barrier to building software quickly was never about how fast you can write the code. Maybe at a startup it is, but for any established company I find most of the friction is systemic management issues.
  - Micheasherman 8mo ago
    Well, considering there are coders who type under 30 WPM and are senior level programmers I would have thought people realized that years ago. Oh well

rsynnott 9mo ago

> But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools. If this were true, we should be seeing evidence of it by now, either in vastly increased output by companies (and open source projects, and indie game devs, etc), or in really _dramatic_ job losses. This is assuming a sensible definition of 'productive'; if you mean 'lines of code' or 'self-assessment', then, eh, maybe, but those aren't useful metrics of productivity.