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Comment by calrain | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could. Some problems are difficult to solve and I still need to pay the bills.

So I work 8 hours a day (to get money to eat) and code another 4 hours at home at night.

Weekends are both 10 hour days, and then rinse / repeat.

Unfortunately some projects are just hard to do and until now, they were too hard to attempt to solve solo. But with AI assistance, I am literally moving mountains.

The project may still be a failure but at least it will fail faster, no different to the pre-AI days.

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Can't you use your AI skills to work only 1 hour? Or is the 8 hours you work already 10xed by AI?

I don't think you are understanding how big 10x and 20x are.

It means you can replace a whole team of developers alone.

I can believe that some tasks are speed up by 10x or even 20x, but I find very hard to believe it's the average of your productivity (maintaining good code quality)

20x0.1 is still just 2. You don't know what calrain's productivity without AI assistance is actually like. "20x" might just be correct, but it doesn't have to be 20x what you do.

(I don't think it's 20x, it's most likely hyperbole. People aren't that unique and it's not hard to see that people who use LLMs are often lulled into thinking they're more valuable to them than they actually are, especially when they "do more", i.e. they're a magic little person program that seems to do tasks on their own as opposed to glorified auto-complete that probably by raw numbers is actually more productive.)

I mean from a time perspective, your mileage may vary.

So me finishing a carded up block of work that is expected to take 2 weeks (80 hours) and I get it done in 1 day (8 hours) then that would be a 10x boost.

There are always tar pits of time where you are no better off with AI, but sometimes it's 20x.

I've setup development teams in the past, and have have been coding since the late 70's, so I am sort of aware of my capabilities.

It super depends on the type of work you're doing.

This is satire, right? You're 60ish years old, and hyper optimistic about AI, it's making you tens of times more productive, paste code from one AI to another, one is the dev and the other is the architect...

I mean, it's literally unbelievable.

It is

> There are always tar pits of time where you are no better off with AI, but sometimes it's 20x.

This is absurd measuring. You can’t in good faith claim a 20x improvement if it only happens “sometimes” and other times it’s a time sink.

The more detail you keep providing in this thread, the clearer it becomes your assessment lands somewhere between the disingenuous and the delusional.

How do you measure 20x when someone says they do that?

Does that mean you deliver the same amount of code in the same time with 20x less bugs?

Or the same quality code in 20x less time?

Or 10x less bugs in 2x less time?

An honest measurement tries to consider the aggregate, not one single point.

If you had a hammer which could drive a nail through a plank 20x faster but took 60x longer to prepare before each strike, claiming 20x gains would be disingenuous.

The problem is that AI leads to extremely bimodal distribution of improvement.

Sometimes it doesn't help at all. Other times it spits out several hours of work in seconds.

It's like asking what is the weighted average of 1 and infinity? Even if you can quantify how many 1s and how many infinities there are, the answer is always going to be nonsensical.

I disagree with your example, but either way your conclusion is agreeing with my point. If you can’t give a sensible answer, then don’t give a random one confidently (like an LLM). The user in question is doing the equivalent of always answering “infinity” (the best case) to your example.

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