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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Say you want to create a web app, but you don't know any web dev. You spend a couple of months reading front-end and back-end dev, incrementally create something, and after half a year you've made a web app you like. Say you spent 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks, going from zero to a functional web app. So you spent 120 hours in total.

Now let's say you use Claude code, or whatever, and you're able to create the same web app over a weekend. You spend 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, in total 12 hours.

That's 10x increase in productivity right there. Did it make you a 10x better programmer? Nope, probably not. But your productivity went up by a tenfold.

And at least to me, that's sort of how it has worked. Things I didn't have motivation or energy to get into before, I can get into over a weekend.

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However, in the first case you learned something which probably is useful when you want to change said app in any way or make another project...

Depends on how you learn.

For me it's 50-50 reading other people's code and getting a feel for the patterns and actually writing the code.

I'm not sure that math makes sense over the long run. Sure, at first you scaffold together an app from scratch, but I suspect over time, the LLM's capability of maintaining it precipitously drops. At some point, you will like reach a productivity level of zero, as now your application has become too complex to fit in a context window and you have no idea how it actually works. So what is the productivity multiplier then?

The issue is that it‘ll absolutely _suck_. If I tell Claude Code to scaffold a web app from 0 outside of React it‘s terrible.

So no, imho people with no app dev skills cannot just build something over a weekend, at least something that won‘t break when the first user logs in.

They will build it, deploy it, get hacked and leak user data.

But at the same time you basically outsourced your brain and any learning that would come from the exercise. So while you now have an app, you've experienced close to 0 learning or growth along the way.

you're going to push that straight to production? Cmon man, its not the same thing, not by a long shot. That's a crap measure. I don't think we can even reliably measure 1x developer output which makes multiplying it even more nonsensical.

This, I agree to this 100%. I was able to get at least 2 apps, 2 SAAS products out by pairing up with AI. I was able to learn this as I go and get an app running in the matter of hours than months. Great for prototype to production. -> learn-> fix -> ship -> learn more -> fix things -> ship more.

That being said, I am a generalist with 10+ years of experience and can spot the good parts from bad parts and can wear many hats. Sure, I do not know everything, but, hey did I know everything when AI was not there? I took help from SO, Reddit and other places. Now, I go to AI, see if it makes sense, apply the fix, learn and move on.

You're talking about a neophyte trying to accomplish an engineering job. So yes, in such case, LLMs dramatically change the game, at least for entry-level tasks. Nowadays, anyone can litteraly pretend to be good/average in any field.

The article relates about actual, experienced engineers trying to get even better. That's a completely different matter.

This is true, for small projects, one-offs and prototypes AI is great, it will save you loads of time.

However most paid jobs don't fall into this category.

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