9 ms·

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the spee

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

slopinthebag 5mo ago
10x would only be possible if your output was low before Claude Code
- hatsix 5mo ago
  I've found that I can have 10x output, so long as I don't expect anyone to review your code...
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    I can get 100x output, if we're counting lines of code!
    - emp17344 5mo ago
      I bet get I could hit 1000x output of random characters produced by smashing my hand against the keyboard.
teddyh 5mo ago
For your sake I hope that your pay is determined by your “output”, and not your long-term usefulness.
jdw64 5mo ago
[flagged]
- altcognito 5mo ago
  Horses weren't replaced overnight. Also, I know that there will be a lot of boilerplate applications that just don't look good or seem to have been well thought out early on. Folks will use that as a cope mechanism, but huge changes are coming.
batshit_beaver 5mo ago
10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.
- bogdanoff_2 5mo ago
  How is that not the same thing?
  - jen20 5mo ago
    Writing code is a part (sometimes a big part, sometimes not) of delivering software to production. The overall system throughput is the interesting thing to look at.
  - CreepGin 5mo ago
    "nine women can't have a baby in a month". Speed of software development is not pure output.
    - whateveracct 5mo ago
      for certain monkeys, they think it is tho there are entire C corps of monkeys out there
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    Code is always easy to multiply fruitlessly, always has been. Features are harder to show the limits of, but have you ever had a client or boss who didn't know what they wanted, they just kept asking for stuff? 100 sequential tickets to change the contrast of some button can be closed in record time, but the final impact is still just the final one of the sequence. Or have you experienced bike-shedding* from coworkers in meetings? It doesn't matter what metaphorical colour the metaphorical bike shed gets painted. Or, as a user, had a mandatory update that either didn't seem to do anything at all, or worse moved things in the UX around so you couldn't find features you actually did use? Something I get with many apps and operating systems; I'd say MacOS's UX peaked back when versions were named after cats. Non-UX stuff got better since then, but the UX (even the creation of SwiftUI as an attempt to replace UIKit and AppKit) feels like it was CV-driven development, not something that benefits me as a user. You can add a lot of features and close a lot of tickets while adding zero-to-negative business value. When code was expensive, that cost could be used directly as a reason to say "let's delay this"; now you have to explain more directly to the boss or the client why they're asking for an actively bad thing instead of it being a replacement of an expensive gamble with a cheap gamble. This is not something most of us are trained to do well, I think. Worse, even those of us who are skilled at that kind of client interactions, the fact of code suddenly being cheap means that many of us have mis-trained instincts on what's actually important, in exactly the way that those customers and bosses should be suspicious of. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
raincole 5mo ago
The premise of "no silver bullet" is wrong (LLM just made it clear, but it has always been wrong). The premise is that the software development had been mostly "essential complexity" rather than "accidental complexity." But I think anyone who worked as SE in the past decade would have found the opposite is true. It's not only that software development is full of accidental complexity. Programmers (and the decision makers above them) have always been actively creating accidental complexity. Making a GUI program hasn't gotten easier since Visual Basic. In fact for each JavaScript framework and technique that wraps around DOM render engine, it has got harder over years. Until LLMs made it easier again (by creating a permanent dependency on LLMs. If you intend to edit the code manually afterwards, it became even harder!)
- Jach 5mo ago
  I think the fuller version of the "'no silver bullet' is wrong" claim is at: https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/ https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/ A weaker claim is that maybe there's no single silver bullet but there have been many bronze bullets that add up to more than a single silver bullet. I readily endorse at least that and think it's rather easy to justify.
deadbabe 5mo ago
Just because code has been put out does not mean the software is “developed”.
skydhash 5mo ago
> that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. > AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. Those are not the same. You can add 5 different features to a project and still provide less value that the 5 lines diff that resolves a performance bottleneck.
- winrid 5mo ago
  "claude, connect to a k8s pod in prod and grab a 30s cpu profile, analyze and create a performance test locally for the top outlier, verify your fix and create a PR"
- jrumbut 5mo ago
  I agree with this sentiment but I think LLMs are really close to the Brooks idea of a silver bullet. I don't know if, overall, it's a 10x improvement or 6x or 14x but it's a serious contender. Part of it is the LLMs are very uneven in their performance across domains. If all I build is simple landing pages, it might be a 100x improvement. If I work on more complex, proprietary work where there aren't great examples in the training data then it might be a 10% improvement (it helps me write better comments or something)
  - BlackFly 5mo ago
    All available evidence points to it being an incremental improvement at best. Higher claims are attributable to the psychological effect of the AI sycophancy problem which erases the Dunning-Kruger effect and makes even experts extremely overconfident. You still have to read the output of your LLM. Learning by reading alone and not doing is not nearly as effective.
gensym 5mo ago
I've been thinking about this and have wanted to discuss it with people. I think the 10x thing has been broken, but I don't think it's because the premise of "No Silver Bullet" was false - I think it's because LLMs have the ability to navigate some of the _essential_ complexity of problems. I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, etc etc etc. The fact that LLMs are able to wrestle with essential complexity means that using them is going to push us further and further from the actual problems we're trying to solve. Right now, it's the wrestling with problems that helps us understand what those problems are. As our organizations adopt LLMs that are able to take on _those_ problems - that is, customer problems, not problems of data, scaling, and so forth - will we hit a brick wall where we lose that understanding? Where we keep shipping stuff but it gets further and further from what our customers need? How do we avoid that?
whateveracct 5mo ago
This was true as programming languages evolved too. It was so much easier to write scripting languages than C. You could crap out scripts like crazy - no cc refusing to give you a binary to get in your way. Clearly..it still wasn't a silver bullet. Because output as a metric is a bad one. I thought it was only one managers valued..but apparently Anthropic has convinced devs to value it finally? i guess it def hits that dopamine receptor hard.
lp4v4n 5mo ago
I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade. When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.
- plausibility 5mo ago
  I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?
- chickensong 5mo ago
  I'm not sure those are great examples. Why not just consider normal apps? I don't think we'll see AAA game velocity change until asset generation progresses quite a bit, not to mention stuff like rigging. Even then, there's still a layer between code and engine where you have to wire everything together which an LLM will struggle with. Replacing some old COBOL is probably more of a management decision based on appetite for change and politics rather than development speed. Aren't there some measurable things like github repo creation, PRs, app store additions, etc. that can be correlated to LLM adoption? Didn't Show HN have to get throttled after LLMs arrived?
  - Towaway69 5mo ago
    I think your answer is the reason why. LLM performance is fine when applied to everything they can do. Take LLM out that safe space and suddenly they are no silver bullet, in fact they are unless. So of course those making the 10x claim mean in the safe space where LLM can handle all activities required. You can’t have it both ways 10x and difficult and confusing tasks for LLMs.
    - chickensong 5mo ago
      Right, I get that. I'm just saying it seems wrong to throw up minority examples. Nobody is pumping out AAA games at speed with LLMs, nor is anyone claiming to do so. There will likely always be some areas where LLMs are bad or useless. How many people are writing crud apps using mainstream languages vs COBOL though? You don't need 100% silver bullet 1-shot everything, just to recognize the signals that for many use cases, there's a significant shift happening. The safe space is expanding and velocity is increasing.
hansvm 5mo ago
I haven't yet seen anyone with a concrete example project (public ideally, but even describing private efforts in enough detail to enable potential criticism would be fine) making a claim as strong as 10x. Are you willing to break the mould and show us what we're all missing?
- ventana 5mo ago
  It's more like ∞x (or N/Ax if you prefer) because the majority of the projects I did with LLM agents wouldn't have existed without them, because I would've never found enough time to work on them. One of the latest things I made with Claude was a tool that allowed me to move a bunch of very low traffic Cloud Run services to a single VPS without losing any of the Cloud Run benefits such as easy Docker-based deployment and automatic certificate provisioning. I thought about making something like that for quite some time, and Claude finally made it possible, which makes me quite happy. The fun thing here is that no other soul genuinely cares about it, or any other code I might publish. The code, especially AI generated, is so cheap that if anyone wants to repeat my steps to get rid of Cloud Run services, they will probably vibe-code their own tool instead of figuring out how to use mine, just like I did that instead of spending time on learning Dokku or similar solutions. So, yes, 10x and more, but no one cares about the result, which makes the whole 10x measurement less useful.
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    The incredulity at 10x claims is often unearned because how much do these skeptics actually notice and appreciate the depth of work of ten developers collaborating on something (if not their own org)? Dev output slips by quietly. There are reams of unnoticed projects even at the scale of a life’s work.
    - Capricorn2481 5mo ago
      This doesn't pass a sniff test at any small organization. And wouldn't these devs see this 10x claim themselves?
cdavid 5mo ago
The main point of mythical man month was that communication cost across people was the main cost as project grow in complexity. So increasing individual output by itself is not enough to affect the argument. It could, if you also reduce the size of people needed for a project, where people are everyone included in the project, not just SWE. But there are strong forces in large orgs to pull toward larger project sizes: budgeting overhead and other similar large orgs optimize for legibility kind of arguments. IMO the only way this will change is when new companies will challenge existing big guys. I think AI will help achieve this (e.g. agentic e-commerce challenging the existing players), but it will take time.
majormajor 5mo ago
First counterexample that comes to mind: Rails vs 90s networked/shared line-of-business crud app development was a 10x factor. It also enabled a lot of internal tools that wouldn't have been worth doing without it. But after people's expectations adjusted it was just back on the treadmill. I don't think we've found a new steady-state yet, but I have some gut feeling guesses about where it's going to be.
- Towaway69 5mo ago
  In particular if that steady-state requires 4 to 40GB blob of binary code to be installed or an internet connection to an AI SaaS provider and a credit card. I remember when coding was free as in beer and freedom!
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    It's okay. In the near future people will not own a computer of significant capability at all, so it's not like they'd even be able to develop without a cloud connection in the first place. And, for the most part, they will be okay with this. Gen Alpha or Beta will tell each other how morally wrong it is to expect for everyone to own a computer or even a smartphone, citing the environmental impacts, slaves mining coltan, and the toxic emotional effects upon people who grew up in the Social Media Dark Ages. Much like present-day Hackernews feels about personal automobile ownership.
- Pamar 5mo ago
  90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects. In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP). So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)
TimTheTinker 5mo ago
AI is certainly able to increase coding speed, especially for experienced engineers who can design the analytical parts themselves (data structures, interfaces, invariants, and process), but in large projects and/or organizations, queuing theory (especially as understood by lean development practitioners like Don Reinertsen) is going to be nasty. Lean development theory teaches us that in a multi-workstream, multi-stage development process, developers should be kept at roughly 65-75% utilization. Otherwise, contra-intuitively, work queue lengths increase exponentially the closer utilization gets to 100%. The reason is that slack in the system absorbs and smooths perturbations and variability, which are inevitable. Furthermore, underutilization is also highly comparable to stock market options: their value increases as variability increases. Slack enables quick pivots with less advance notice. It builds continuous responsiveness into the system. And as the Agile Manifesto tells us, excellent software development is more characterized by the ability to respond to change than the mere ability to follow a plan. Customers appreciate responsiveness from software vendors; it builds trust, which is increasing in value all the more with the rise of AI. But AI-driven development threatens to increase, not decrease individual engineer utilization. More is expected, more is possible, and frankly, once you learn how to guardrail the AI and give it no trust to design well analytically, the speed a senior engineer can achieve while writing great code with AI assistance often feels intoxicating. I think we're going to go through a whole new spat of hard, counterintuitive lessons similar to those many 1960s and 70s developers like Fred Brooks and his IBM team learned the hard way.
ssivark 5mo ago
So there's input (prompts/requests/tokens), then there's outputs (lines of code) and there's outcomes. How much have the outcomes improved? Not just yours, but I'm more curious on the outcomes with regards to the actual need your projects are solving.
mbeex 5mo ago
That is far from proven, 'far' being the keyword here in another understanding. At _this_ moment, AI is in the state of producing things - if you like with factor 10 or more. But what will come afterwards, when all this mush of code shall create _reliable_ results. This means not man month then, rather man years or decades to fix this billion and maybe trillions lines of opaque probabilistic LOC. You have to take the mean of these two stages, if nothing qualitative happens to the models.
OtherShrezzing 5mo ago
You’re describing output while the essay is discussing productivity. If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before. Has your salary increased 10x?
- doesnt_know 5mo ago
  I don't believe the 10x claims, but since when has salary been any indication of productivity?
  - OtherShrezzing 5mo ago
    Productivity is a value measured in dollars. So if you’re 10x more productive, someone somewhere is making 10x the $ value from your output. You should expect this to be reflected in the labour market somewhere. Maybe not your own salary, but in somebody’s salary.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dgellow 5mo ago
      In economics productivity is generally the outputs divided by the inputs used for production. Are you talking specifically about capital productivity?
    - tehjoker 5mo ago
      One of the most important graphs in economics shows a divergence between increases in labor productivity and worker take home share since at least the 1970s maybe you are thinking ceos or shareholders
- aryehof 5mo ago
  Salary stays the same. A bunch of others are fired. You’re expected to produce their level of output as well as your own. After all, you’re 10x more productive now?
boron1006 5mo ago
Conversely, the value of software has dropped to 1/10 of what it was before Claude code existed. I’m being glib, but there’s a whole class of software (eg simple crud apps) that just don’t have any marginal value anymore. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 10X faster or 100X faster. 100 x $0 is still 0.
- zemvpferreira 5mo ago
  You mean the price of software, as well as the cost. The value (to the user) is the same if not more.
  - boron1006 5mo ago
    Unless the user just vibe-codes their own version. Which is what I’m seeing at my job. All of these “afternoon vibe code” projects never actually get users because everyone just vibe-codes their own.
    - darkwater 5mo ago
      But GP statement is still true. You just cut out a middleman.
      - boron1006 5mo ago
        But “your software” isn’t bringing value anymore if people don’t use it. The things that the software does might have value, but the marginal utility of your software is effectively 0.
codingdave 5mo ago
The disconnect here is a lack of proof that your increase in personal output actually increases the speed of software development. Considering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule as a joking, but true fact of how software projects go, does AI skip that 2nd 90%? Or do we add a whole new bottleneck of review and corrections, and still need to code that last 90%? When I measure software dev, delivery of code isn't even a metric I care about. It is a key part of the process, to be sure, but I care about results - Did we ship? Did it work? Do we have happier customers and a smaller bug list? In my experience, while I can answer "yes" to those questions on people who use AI assistance surgically, applying it where its strengths lie... I can answer an emphatic "No" for the teams I've worked with who are "AI-first", making the AI usage itself part of their goals.
conartist6 5mo ago
Oh spare me! Anyone can "output" 10x more code. Fred knew you could slap 10x more people on a team and "output" 10x more code. What this article explains is why despite your feelings of untouchable success, on average the experience of using software just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, making this the worst era for software quality that I've ever lived through Didn't we already do this with every company looking to hire "rockstar programmers"? I don't recall that that ended well.
nonameiguess 5mo ago
This seems like somewhat of a mischaracterization. He contrasted improvements in software with improvements in hardware, saying we'd never have something like a Moore's law for software where performance doubled or cost halved equally rapidly. Churning out software faster doesn't mean it's any better. We also seem to fall into these ruts of not understanding what is meant by labor productivity. When an economist is presenting the common outputs / inputs measure, they don't mean raw quantity of output. They're talking about the value added by outputs divided by the value of inputs. Churning out software faster that doesn't earn anybody additional revenue is not making us more productive. It's disheartening that even c-suites with business education don't seem to understand this. That's not to say there is no productivity gain. Plenty of AI-adjacent hyperscalers are seeing ridiculous growth right now, but no non-startup is seeing revenue 10x what it was the year before, not even NVIDIA. A lot of this is just basic diminishing marginal utility. There is only so much value to be added. Software is usually either a semi-automated controller or human decision making augmenter to some kind of physical manufacturing process, or entertainment, when we talk about ultimately delivering value. Everything else is an intermediate input. We can only be so entertained. For physical goods, we have food, space, clothing seemingly at a sufficient level to satisfy just about everyone, with the reasons for value not being maximized having to do with distribution. Unless your software manages to solve borders, bigotry, cultural incompatibility, poverty, mental illess, physical illness, violence, I'm not sure what the other big rocks are. Software can absolutely be a key part of infrastructure to facilitate distribution. That's exactly what the Internet is, along with all the backend business and logistics systems out there in existence. But without hitting the true big rocks, where is the 10x value supposed to come from? We're talking incremental gains simply because we're not in the dark ages any more and incremental gains are all that's there. Short of Star Trek style replicators and transporters, I'm not sure what could realistically multiply global value by 10. Without the value, then sure, you may be churning out 10 times as many discrete projects used by at least one person, or 10 times as many lines of code, but that was never the point. Your personalized notes and grocery ordering apps you share with your wife might excite you for a few weeks, but I can assure you they aren't going to revolutionize your life.
HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. This reminds me of ThePrimeagen noting that Dario was right about 90% of all software being written by AI. 90%+ of all useful software is still being written by humans, but now we've also got non-programmers like Gary Tan pushing the button to generate garbage piles of AI generated code at 10x the volume of what humans are generating. Or look at Claude Code itself, the poster child for what AI generated code looks like, especially when you're operating in YOLO "never mind the quality, count the LOC" mode. Over a half million lines of bug ridden crap when 10-50K could have done the job. https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-claude https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-cl...
- eloisant 5mo ago
  Software written in Big tech companies is probably written at 90% with AI. Now you could claim that software from Google/Meta/Microsoft is useless, but billions of humans rely on it every day.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
    I highly doubt that, unless you are talking about something much more specific like test cases. There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Most of the software that "billions" of humans are relying from any of these companies are things like Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Google Search, FaceBook, that were not written, or rewritten, in last 1-2 years, so were certainly not written by AI.
    - marcosdumay 5mo ago
      > There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Oh, if you look at real signs, like uptime and number of bugs, they are becoming very clear. But it's not clear how much of it is caused by the layoffs and how much is because of LLMs.
      - 5mo ago
globular-toast 5mo ago
Even assuming you are correct, does your "output" being 10x actually mean "a 10x increase in the speed of software development"?
johnyzee 5mo ago
It's mostly slop. And sometimes slop is good enough. But Fred Brooks was talking about actual software systems, not a shop front for an amateur wine importer.
dzonga 5mo ago
your output !! but is the industry output over 10X ?
RaftPeople 5mo ago
> Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. I think the statement is generally true, but I also think there are specific tools that do vastly increase dev time for something that follows that specific pattern. Program templates and also code generation have been used forever to simplify and speed up specific types of programs, like all of the CRUD programs in an ERP system for maintaining the hundreds to thousands of different master data like Customers, etc. Those approaches can speed a specific activity that follows a specific pattern by some multiplier (e.g. 4x or 10x). But the trade-off is time to build the template or code gen vs number of instances it will be used. I think where "no silver bullet" has the strongest case is for something completely new where the patterns and templates have not been established. When I think about LLM's and compare to past templates and code gen, I wonder what exactly is the nature of the LLM trade-off in the broad sense. For a template, it's pretty clearly up front design+dev compared to number of instances of usage of the template. LLM's are more general and more broadly applicable, but still not the same as a human. Is the trade-off purely cost that was sunk into the model and tool that now needs to be recouped by the AI company? (e.g. charging the actual $1,000 to $1,500 that it really costs instead of $200 Or are the big trade-offs and costs going to show up in the future: the dwindling of human expertise due to reliance on the tool and the loss of understanding of complex systems.

slopinthebag 5mo ago

10x would only be possible if your output was low before Claude Code

hatsix 5mo ago
I've found that I can have 10x output, so long as I don't expect anyone to review your code...
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  I can get 100x output, if we're counting lines of code!
  - emp17344 5mo ago
    I bet get I could hit 1000x output of random characters produced by smashing my hand against the keyboard.

teddyh 5mo ago

For your sake I hope that your pay is determined by your “output”, and not your long-term usefulness.

jdw64 5mo ago

[flagged]

altcognito 5mo ago
Horses weren't replaced overnight. Also, I know that there will be a lot of boilerplate applications that just don't look good or seem to have been well thought out early on. Folks will use that as a cope mechanism, but huge changes are coming.

batshit_beaver 5mo ago

10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.

bogdanoff_2 5mo ago
How is that not the same thing?
- jen20 5mo ago
  Writing code is a part (sometimes a big part, sometimes not) of delivering software to production. The overall system throughput is the interesting thing to look at.
- CreepGin 5mo ago
  "nine women can't have a baby in a month". Speed of software development is not pure output.
  - whateveracct 5mo ago
    for certain monkeys, they think it is tho there are entire C corps of monkeys out there
- ben_w 5mo ago
  Code is always easy to multiply fruitlessly, always has been. Features are harder to show the limits of, but have you ever had a client or boss who didn't know what they wanted, they just kept asking for stuff? 100 sequential tickets to change the contrast of some button can be closed in record time, but the final impact is still just the final one of the sequence. Or have you experienced bike-shedding* from coworkers in meetings? It doesn't matter what metaphorical colour the metaphorical bike shed gets painted. Or, as a user, had a mandatory update that either didn't seem to do anything at all, or worse moved things in the UX around so you couldn't find features you actually did use? Something I get with many apps and operating systems; I'd say MacOS's UX peaked back when versions were named after cats. Non-UX stuff got better since then, but the UX (even the creation of SwiftUI as an attempt to replace UIKit and AppKit) feels like it was CV-driven development, not something that benefits me as a user. You can add a lot of features and close a lot of tickets while adding zero-to-negative business value. When code was expensive, that cost could be used directly as a reason to say "let's delay this"; now you have to explain more directly to the boss or the client why they're asking for an actively bad thing instead of it being a replacement of an expensive gamble with a cheap gamble. This is not something most of us are trained to do well, I think. Worse, even those of us who are skilled at that kind of client interactions, the fact of code suddenly being cheap means that many of us have mis-trained instincts on what's actually important, in exactly the way that those customers and bosses should be suspicious of. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

raincole 5mo ago

The premise of "no silver bullet" is wrong (LLM just made it clear, but it has always been wrong). The premise is that the software development had been mostly "essential complexity" rather than "accidental complexity." But I think anyone who worked as SE in the past decade would have found the opposite is true. It's not only that software development is full of accidental complexity. Programmers (and the decision makers above them) have always been actively creating accidental complexity. Making a GUI program hasn't gotten easier since Visual Basic. In fact for each JavaScript framework and technique that wraps around DOM render engine, it has got harder over years. Until LLMs made it easier again (by creating a permanent dependency on LLMs. If you intend to edit the code manually afterwards, it became even harder!)

Jach 5mo ago
I think the fuller version of the "'no silver bullet' is wrong" claim is at: https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/ https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/ A weaker claim is that maybe there's no single silver bullet but there have been many bronze bullets that add up to more than a single silver bullet. I readily endorse at least that and think it's rather easy to justify.

deadbabe 5mo ago

Just because code has been put out does not mean the software is “developed”.

skydhash 5mo ago

> that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. > AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. Those are not the same. You can add 5 different features to a project and still provide less value that the 5 lines diff that resolves a performance bottleneck.

winrid 5mo ago
"claude, connect to a k8s pod in prod and grab a 30s cpu profile, analyze and create a performance test locally for the top outlier, verify your fix and create a PR"
jrumbut 5mo ago
I agree with this sentiment but I think LLMs are really close to the Brooks idea of a silver bullet. I don't know if, overall, it's a 10x improvement or 6x or 14x but it's a serious contender. Part of it is the LLMs are very uneven in their performance across domains. If all I build is simple landing pages, it might be a 100x improvement. If I work on more complex, proprietary work where there aren't great examples in the training data then it might be a 10% improvement (it helps me write better comments or something)
- BlackFly 5mo ago
  All available evidence points to it being an incremental improvement at best. Higher claims are attributable to the psychological effect of the AI sycophancy problem which erases the Dunning-Kruger effect and makes even experts extremely overconfident. You still have to read the output of your LLM. Learning by reading alone and not doing is not nearly as effective.

gensym 5mo ago

I've been thinking about this and have wanted to discuss it with people. I think the 10x thing has been broken, but I don't think it's because the premise of "No Silver Bullet" was false - I think it's because LLMs have the ability to navigate some of the _essential_ complexity of problems. I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, etc etc etc. The fact that LLMs are able to wrestle with essential complexity means that using them is going to push us further and further from the actual problems we're trying to solve. Right now, it's the wrestling with problems that helps us understand what those problems are. As our organizations adopt LLMs that are able to take on _those_ problems - that is, customer problems, not problems of data, scaling, and so forth - will we hit a brick wall where we lose that understanding? Where we keep shipping stuff but it gets further and further from what our customers need? How do we avoid that?

whateveracct 5mo ago

This was true as programming languages evolved too. It was so much easier to write scripting languages than C. You could crap out scripts like crazy - no cc refusing to give you a binary to get in your way. Clearly..it still wasn't a silver bullet. Because output as a metric is a bad one. I thought it was only one managers valued..but apparently Anthropic has convinced devs to value it finally? i guess it def hits that dopamine receptor hard.

lp4v4n 5mo ago

I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade. When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.

plausibility 5mo ago
I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?
chickensong 5mo ago
I'm not sure those are great examples. Why not just consider normal apps? I don't think we'll see AAA game velocity change until asset generation progresses quite a bit, not to mention stuff like rigging. Even then, there's still a layer between code and engine where you have to wire everything together which an LLM will struggle with. Replacing some old COBOL is probably more of a management decision based on appetite for change and politics rather than development speed. Aren't there some measurable things like github repo creation, PRs, app store additions, etc. that can be correlated to LLM adoption? Didn't Show HN have to get throttled after LLMs arrived?
- Towaway69 5mo ago
  I think your answer is the reason why. LLM performance is fine when applied to everything they can do. Take LLM out that safe space and suddenly they are no silver bullet, in fact they are unless. So of course those making the 10x claim mean in the safe space where LLM can handle all activities required. You can’t have it both ways 10x and difficult and confusing tasks for LLMs.
  - chickensong 5mo ago
    Right, I get that. I'm just saying it seems wrong to throw up minority examples. Nobody is pumping out AAA games at speed with LLMs, nor is anyone claiming to do so. There will likely always be some areas where LLMs are bad or useless. How many people are writing crud apps using mainstream languages vs COBOL though? You don't need 100% silver bullet 1-shot everything, just to recognize the signals that for many use cases, there's a significant shift happening. The safe space is expanding and velocity is increasing.

hansvm 5mo ago

I haven't yet seen anyone with a concrete example project (public ideally, but even describing private efforts in enough detail to enable potential criticism would be fine) making a claim as strong as 10x. Are you willing to break the mould and show us what we're all missing?

ventana 5mo ago
It's more like ∞x (or N/Ax if you prefer) because the majority of the projects I did with LLM agents wouldn't have existed without them, because I would've never found enough time to work on them. One of the latest things I made with Claude was a tool that allowed me to move a bunch of very low traffic Cloud Run services to a single VPS without losing any of the Cloud Run benefits such as easy Docker-based deployment and automatic certificate provisioning. I thought about making something like that for quite some time, and Claude finally made it possible, which makes me quite happy. The fun thing here is that no other soul genuinely cares about it, or any other code I might publish. The code, especially AI generated, is so cheap that if anyone wants to repeat my steps to get rid of Cloud Run services, they will probably vibe-code their own tool instead of figuring out how to use mine, just like I did that instead of spending time on learning Dokku or similar solutions. So, yes, 10x and more, but no one cares about the result, which makes the whole 10x measurement less useful.
- wahnfrieden 5mo ago
  The incredulity at 10x claims is often unearned because how much do these skeptics actually notice and appreciate the depth of work of ten developers collaborating on something (if not their own org)? Dev output slips by quietly. There are reams of unnoticed projects even at the scale of a life’s work.
  - Capricorn2481 5mo ago
    This doesn't pass a sniff test at any small organization. And wouldn't these devs see this 10x claim themselves?

cdavid 5mo ago

The main point of mythical man month was that communication cost across people was the main cost as project grow in complexity. So increasing individual output by itself is not enough to affect the argument. It could, if you also reduce the size of people needed for a project, where people are everyone included in the project, not just SWE. But there are strong forces in large orgs to pull toward larger project sizes: budgeting overhead and other similar large orgs optimize for legibility kind of arguments. IMO the only way this will change is when new companies will challenge existing big guys. I think AI will help achieve this (e.g. agentic e-commerce challenging the existing players), but it will take time.

majormajor 5mo ago

First counterexample that comes to mind: Rails vs 90s networked/shared line-of-business crud app development was a 10x factor. It also enabled a lot of internal tools that wouldn't have been worth doing without it. But after people's expectations adjusted it was just back on the treadmill. I don't think we've found a new steady-state yet, but I have some gut feeling guesses about where it's going to be.

Towaway69 5mo ago
In particular if that steady-state requires 4 to 40GB blob of binary code to be installed or an internet connection to an AI SaaS provider and a credit card. I remember when coding was free as in beer and freedom!
- bitwize 5mo ago
  It's okay. In the near future people will not own a computer of significant capability at all, so it's not like they'd even be able to develop without a cloud connection in the first place. And, for the most part, they will be okay with this. Gen Alpha or Beta will tell each other how morally wrong it is to expect for everyone to own a computer or even a smartphone, citing the environmental impacts, slaves mining coltan, and the toxic emotional effects upon people who grew up in the Social Media Dark Ages. Much like present-day Hackernews feels about personal automobile ownership.
Pamar 5mo ago
90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects. In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP). So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)

TimTheTinker 5mo ago

AI is certainly able to increase coding speed, especially for experienced engineers who can design the analytical parts themselves (data structures, interfaces, invariants, and process), but in large projects and/or organizations, queuing theory (especially as understood by lean development practitioners like Don Reinertsen) is going to be nasty. Lean development theory teaches us that in a multi-workstream, multi-stage development process, developers should be kept at roughly 65-75% utilization. Otherwise, contra-intuitively, work queue lengths increase exponentially the closer utilization gets to 100%. The reason is that slack in the system absorbs and smooths perturbations and variability, which are inevitable. Furthermore, underutilization is also highly comparable to stock market options: their value increases as variability increases. Slack enables quick pivots with less advance notice. It builds continuous responsiveness into the system. And as the Agile Manifesto tells us, excellent software development is more characterized by the ability to respond to change than the mere ability to follow a plan. Customers appreciate responsiveness from software vendors; it builds trust, which is increasing in value all the more with the rise of AI. But AI-driven development threatens to increase, not decrease individual engineer utilization. More is expected, more is possible, and frankly, once you learn how to guardrail the AI and give it no trust to design well analytically, the speed a senior engineer can achieve while writing great code with AI assistance often feels intoxicating. I think we're going to go through a whole new spat of hard, counterintuitive lessons similar to those many 1960s and 70s developers like Fred Brooks and his IBM team learned the hard way.

ssivark 5mo ago

So there's input (prompts/requests/tokens), then there's outputs (lines of code) and there's outcomes. How much have the outcomes improved? Not just yours, but I'm more curious on the outcomes with regards to the actual need your projects are solving.

mbeex 5mo ago

That is far from proven, 'far' being the keyword here in another understanding. At _this_ moment, AI is in the state of producing things - if you like with factor 10 or more. But what will come afterwards, when all this mush of code shall create _reliable_ results. This means not man month then, rather man years or decades to fix this billion and maybe trillions lines of opaque probabilistic LOC. You have to take the mean of these two stages, if nothing qualitative happens to the models.

OtherShrezzing 5mo ago

You’re describing output while the essay is discussing productivity. If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before. Has your salary increased 10x?

doesnt_know 5mo ago
I don't believe the 10x claims, but since when has salary been any indication of productivity?
- OtherShrezzing 5mo ago
  Productivity is a value measured in dollars. So if you’re 10x more productive, someone somewhere is making 10x the $ value from your output. You should expect this to be reflected in the labour market somewhere. Maybe not your own salary, but in somebody’s salary.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    In economics productivity is generally the outputs divided by the inputs used for production. Are you talking specifically about capital productivity?
  - tehjoker 5mo ago
    One of the most important graphs in economics shows a divergence between increases in labor productivity and worker take home share since at least the 1970s maybe you are thinking ceos or shareholders
aryehof 5mo ago
Salary stays the same. A bunch of others are fired. You’re expected to produce their level of output as well as your own. After all, you’re 10x more productive now?

boron1006 5mo ago

Conversely, the value of software has dropped to 1/10 of what it was before Claude code existed. I’m being glib, but there’s a whole class of software (eg simple crud apps) that just don’t have any marginal value anymore. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 10X faster or 100X faster. 100 x $0 is still 0.

zemvpferreira 5mo ago
You mean the price of software, as well as the cost. The value (to the user) is the same if not more.
- boron1006 5mo ago
  Unless the user just vibe-codes their own version. Which is what I’m seeing at my job. All of these “afternoon vibe code” projects never actually get users because everyone just vibe-codes their own.
  - darkwater 5mo ago
    But GP statement is still true. You just cut out a middleman.
    - boron1006 5mo ago
      But “your software” isn’t bringing value anymore if people don’t use it. The things that the software does might have value, but the marginal utility of your software is effectively 0.

codingdave 5mo ago

The disconnect here is a lack of proof that your increase in personal output actually increases the speed of software development. Considering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule as a joking, but true fact of how software projects go, does AI skip that 2nd 90%? Or do we add a whole new bottleneck of review and corrections, and still need to code that last 90%? When I measure software dev, delivery of code isn't even a metric I care about. It is a key part of the process, to be sure, but I care about results - Did we ship? Did it work? Do we have happier customers and a smaller bug list? In my experience, while I can answer "yes" to those questions on people who use AI assistance surgically, applying it where its strengths lie... I can answer an emphatic "No" for the teams I've worked with who are "AI-first", making the AI usage itself part of their goals.

conartist6 5mo ago

Oh spare me! Anyone can "output" 10x more code. Fred knew you could slap 10x more people on a team and "output" 10x more code. What this article explains is why despite your feelings of untouchable success, on average the experience of using software just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, making this the worst era for software quality that I've ever lived through Didn't we already do this with every company looking to hire "rockstar programmers"? I don't recall that that ended well.

nonameiguess 5mo ago

This seems like somewhat of a mischaracterization. He contrasted improvements in software with improvements in hardware, saying we'd never have something like a Moore's law for software where performance doubled or cost halved equally rapidly. Churning out software faster doesn't mean it's any better. We also seem to fall into these ruts of not understanding what is meant by labor productivity. When an economist is presenting the common outputs / inputs measure, they don't mean raw quantity of output. They're talking about the value added by outputs divided by the value of inputs. Churning out software faster that doesn't earn anybody additional revenue is not making us more productive. It's disheartening that even c-suites with business education don't seem to understand this. That's not to say there is no productivity gain. Plenty of AI-adjacent hyperscalers are seeing ridiculous growth right now, but no non-startup is seeing revenue 10x what it was the year before, not even NVIDIA. A lot of this is just basic diminishing marginal utility. There is only so much value to be added. Software is usually either a semi-automated controller or human decision making augmenter to some kind of physical manufacturing process, or entertainment, when we talk about ultimately delivering value. Everything else is an intermediate input. We can only be so entertained. For physical goods, we have food, space, clothing seemingly at a sufficient level to satisfy just about everyone, with the reasons for value not being maximized having to do with distribution. Unless your software manages to solve borders, bigotry, cultural incompatibility, poverty, mental illess, physical illness, violence, I'm not sure what the other big rocks are. Software can absolutely be a key part of infrastructure to facilitate distribution. That's exactly what the Internet is, along with all the backend business and logistics systems out there in existence. But without hitting the true big rocks, where is the 10x value supposed to come from? We're talking incremental gains simply because we're not in the dark ages any more and incremental gains are all that's there. Short of Star Trek style replicators and transporters, I'm not sure what could realistically multiply global value by 10. Without the value, then sure, you may be churning out 10 times as many discrete projects used by at least one person, or 10 times as many lines of code, but that was never the point. Your personalized notes and grocery ordering apps you share with your wife might excite you for a few weeks, but I can assure you they aren't going to revolutionize your life.

HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago

> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. This reminds me of ThePrimeagen noting that Dario was right about 90% of all software being written by AI. 90%+ of all useful software is still being written by humans, but now we've also got non-programmers like Gary Tan pushing the button to generate garbage piles of AI generated code at 10x the volume of what humans are generating. Or look at Claude Code itself, the poster child for what AI generated code looks like, especially when you're operating in YOLO "never mind the quality, count the LOC" mode. Over a half million lines of bug ridden crap when 10-50K could have done the job. https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-claude https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-cl...

eloisant 5mo ago
Software written in Big tech companies is probably written at 90% with AI. Now you could claim that software from Google/Meta/Microsoft is useless, but billions of humans rely on it every day.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
  I highly doubt that, unless you are talking about something much more specific like test cases. There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Most of the software that "billions" of humans are relying from any of these companies are things like Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Google Search, FaceBook, that were not written, or rewritten, in last 1-2 years, so were certainly not written by AI.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    > There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Oh, if you look at real signs, like uptime and number of bugs, they are becoming very clear. But it's not clear how much of it is caused by the layoffs and how much is because of LLMs.
    - 5mo ago

globular-toast 5mo ago

Even assuming you are correct, does your "output" being 10x actually mean "a 10x increase in the speed of software development"?

johnyzee 5mo ago

It's mostly slop. And sometimes slop is good enough. But Fred Brooks was talking about actual software systems, not a shop front for an amateur wine importer.

dzonga 5mo ago

your output !! but is the industry output over 10X ?

RaftPeople 5mo ago

> Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. I think the statement is generally true, but I also think there are specific tools that do vastly increase dev time for something that follows that specific pattern. Program templates and also code generation have been used forever to simplify and speed up specific types of programs, like all of the CRUD programs in an ERP system for maintaining the hundreds to thousands of different master data like Customers, etc. Those approaches can speed a specific activity that follows a specific pattern by some multiplier (e.g. 4x or 10x). But the trade-off is time to build the template or code gen vs number of instances it will be used. I think where "no silver bullet" has the strongest case is for something completely new where the patterns and templates have not been established. When I think about LLM's and compare to past templates and code gen, I wonder what exactly is the nature of the LLM trade-off in the broad sense. For a template, it's pretty clearly up front design+dev compared to number of instances of usage of the template. LLM's are more general and more broadly applicable, but still not the same as a human. Is the trade-off purely cost that was sunk into the model and tool that now needs to be recouped by the AI company? (e.g. charging the actual $1,000 to $1,500 that it really costs instead of $200 Or are the big trade-offs and costs going to show up in the future: the dwindling of human expertise due to reliance on the tool and the loss of understanding of complex systems.