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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

I use it at work everyday. I work with people who use it everyday. 100x is complete and utter nonsense.

100x means that I can finish something that would have taken me 10 years in a little over a month.

It would be obvious not because people are posting “I get a 100x productivity boost”, but because show HN would be filled with “look at this database engine I wrote in a month”, and “check out this OS that took me 2 months”.

And people at work would be posting new repos where they completely rewrote entire apps from the ground up to solve annoying tech debt issues.

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You’re missing the point by bike shedding on “100x”

It’s probably higher tbh because there’s things I prototyped to test an assumption on, realized it was O(N^2) then dumped it and tried 4 more architecture simulations to get to one that was implementable with existing tool chains I know

So you’re doing exactly what i called out which is evaluating it as a magic oracle instead of what I said which is that it makes me personally something like 100x more productive as a support tool, which often means quickly ruling out bad ideas

Preventing a problem in architecture is worth way more than 100x

You can prototype by hand too. Personally I find it might take me 10 min to try a change with an LLM that would have taken me 30 min to 1hr by hand. It's a very nice gain but given the other things to do that aren't sped up by LLM all that much (thinking about the options, communicating with the team), it's not _that_ crazy.

If what you meant by 100x more productive is that sometimes for very some specific things it made you 100x more productive, and that isn’t applicable to software development in general, I can see that.

I have many times delivered a year of value in a few days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to build something instead of just building exactly what someone asked for.

>I have many times delivered a year of value in a few days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to build something instead of just building exactly what someone asked for.

Knowing what not to do more of a superpower than knowing what to do - cause it’s possible to know

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