Hacker News Reader

Use case mapping matters. I use AI tools at work (have for a few years now, first Copilot from GitHub, now I use Gemini and Claude tools primarily). When the use case maps well, it is great. You can typically assume anything with a large corpus of fairly standard problems will map well in a popular language. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, these have huge training datasets from open source alone.

The combination of which, deep training dataset + maps well to how AI "understands" code, it can be a real enabler. I've done it myself. All I've done with some projects is write tests, point Claude at the tests and ask it to write code till those tests pass, then audit said code, make adjustments as required, and ship.

That has worked well and sped up development of straightforward (sometimes I'd argue trivial) situations.

Where it falls down is complex problem sets, major refactors that cross cut multiple interdependent pieces of code, its less robust with less popular languages (we have a particular set of business logic in Rust due to its sensitive nature and need for speed, it does a not great job with that) and a host of other areas I have hit limitations with it.

Granted, I work in a fairly specialized way and deal with alot of business logic / rules rather than boiler plate CRUD, but I have hit walls on things like massive refactors in large codebases (50K is small to me, for reference)

Did you do 5-10 years of work in the year after you adopted AI? If you started after AI came in to existence 3 years ago (/s) you should have achieved 30 years of work output - a whole career of work.

I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like meetings, alignment, etc, etc.

But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was able to entirely redesign my website in a week. When working on personal projects I don't need to worry about stakeholders at all.

I'm not sure why, but it seems like your comment really brought out the ire in a few commenters here to discredit your experience.

Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation?

I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that.

At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comments section.

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims.

That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk.

If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not make you 10x more productive.

Meanwhile, the people claiming 10x productivity are taken at face value by people who don’t know any better, and we end up in an insane hype cycle that has obvious externalities. Things like management telling people that they must use AI or else. Things like developer tooling making zero progress on anything that isn’t an AI feature for the last two years. Things like RAM becoming unaffordable because Silicon Valley thinks they are a step away from inventing god. And I haven’t scratched the surface.

But I really did do around 4 to 5 weeks of work in a single week on my personal site. At this point you just seem to be denying my own reality.

If you read my comments, you’ll see that I did no such thing. I asked if you did 5-10 years of work in the last year (or 5-10 weeks of work in the last week) and didn’t get a response until you accused me of denying your reality.

You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much code written on a side project).

It’s not a personal attack, it is a corrective to the trend of claiming 5,10,100x improvements to developer productivity, which rarely if ever holds up to scrutiny.

What you are seeing is the difference between what I personally feel and what I could objectively prove to an AI skeptic.

If I have to "prove" my productivity in a court of law - that is to say, you - I'll down-modulate it to focus on the bits that are most objective, because I understand you will be skeptical. For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time. There were also a few nightmarish bugs that I feel could have taken me literally hours or infinity (I would have just given up), like tracking down a breaking change snuck in in a TS minor update when I upgraded from 2.8 to latest, that Codex chomped through. But I imagine me handwaving "it's definitely 10x, just trust me" on those ones, where the alternatives aren't particularly clear, might not be an argument you'd readily accept. On the other hand, the 5x gains when writing my website, using tech I know inside and out, felt objective.

> For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time.

I think this is where the lede is buried. Yes, it takes time up front. But then you learn(ed) it and can apply those skills quickly in the future.

In 10 years when all sorts of new tech is around, will you read the docs? Or just count on an LLM?

I mean, in my comment I did say that an AI skeptic probably wouldn't buy that argument. So I'm not too surprised that you're not buying it.

That being said, I have taught myself a ridiculous amount of tech with AI. It's not always great at depth, but it sure is amazing at breadth. And I can still turn to docs for depth when I need to.

> I mean, in my comment I did say that an AI skeptic probably wouldn't buy that argument. So I'm not too surprised that you're not buying it.

Makes sense. I’d probably be less skeptical if a/ we had a definition of AI and b/ people stopped calling LLMs “AI”

It is really neat tech. It is absolutely “artificial” and it absolutely is not “intelligent”

> That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year.

What makes you think one year is the right timeframe? Yet you seem to be so wildly confident in the strength of what you think your question will reveal… in spite of the fact that the guy gave you an example.

It wasn’t that he didn’t provide it, it was that you didn’t want to hear it.

It’s a general question I ask of everyone who claims they are 10x more productive. Year/month/day/hour doesn’t matter. Did you do 10 days of work yesterday? 10 weeks of work last week?

It is actually a very forgiving metric over a year because it is measuring only your own productivity relative to your personal trend. That includes vacation time and sick time, so the year smooths over all the variation.

Maybe he did do 5 weeks of work in 1 week, and I’ll accept that (a much more modest claim than the usual 10-100x claimed multiplier).

Yeah, but he gave you an affirmative answer, that it did make him more productive, and you keep moving the goalposts as I watch.

Not only that, I think you're misrepresenting his claim:

> I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on

1) He didn't say 10-100x

2) He said it depended on the work he was doing

Those seem reasonable enough that I can take his experience at face value.

This isn't about you pressure testing his claim, this is about you just being unwilling to believe his experience because it doesn't fit the narrative you've already got in your head.

Ah, I was going to say it’s impossible to get 5x increase in productivity, because writing code takes up less than 20% of a developer’s time. But I can understand that kind of improvement on just the coding part.

The trick now is deciding what code to write quickly enough to keep Claude and friends busy.

I will say for example now at work.. if I see a broken window I have an AI fix it. This is a recent habit for me, so I can't say it will stick, but I'm fixing issues in many more adjacent code bases then I normally would.

It used to be "hey I found an issue..", now it is like "here is a pr to fix an issue I saw". The net effort to me is only slightly more. I usually have to identify the problem and that is like 90% of fixing it.

Add to the fact that now I can have an AI take a first pass at identifying the problem with probably an 80%+ success rate.

Your site has waterfalls and flashes of unstyled content. It loads slowly and the whole design is basically exactly what every AI-designed site looks like.

All of the work you described is essentially manual labor. It's not difficult work - just boring, sometimes error prone work that mostly requires you to do obvious things and then tackle errors as they pop up in very obvious ways. Great use case for AI, for sure. This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well, except maybe in the sense that yeah, AI is great for dull work in the same way an excavator is great for digging ditches.

> This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well

If you ever find yourself at the point where you are insulting a guy's passion project in order to prove a point, perhaps have a deep breath, and take a step back from the computer for a moment. And maybe you should look deep inside yourself, because you might have crossed the threshold to being a jerk.

Yes, my site has issues. You know what else it has? Users. Your comments about FOUC and waterfalls are correct, but they don't rank particularly high on what are important to people who used the site. I didn't instruct the AI to fix them, because I was busy fixing a bunch of real problems that my actual users cared about.

As for loading slowly -- it loads in 400ms on my machine.

Look, buddy. You propped yourself up as an Experienced Dev doing cool stuff at Profitable Startup and don't understand Advanced Programming, and your entire argument is that you can keep doing the same sort of high quality(FSOV) work you've been doing the past 10 years with AI, just a lot faster.

I'm just calling spade a spade. If you didn't want people to comment on your side project given your arguments and the topic of discussion, you should just not have posted it in a public forum or have done better work.

If I were to summarize the intent of my comments in a single sentence, it would be something like "I have been an engineer for a while, and I have been able to do fun stuff with AI quickly." You somehow managed to respond to that by disparaging me as an engineer ("Experienced Dev") and saying the fun stuff I did is low quality ("should have [...] done better work"). It's so far away from the point I was making, and so wildly negative - when, again, my only intent was to say that I was doing fun AI stuff - that I can't imagine where it originated from. The fact that it's about a passion project is really the cherry on top. Do you tell your kids that their artwork is awful as well?

I can understand to some degree it would be chafing that I described myself as working at a SF Series C startup etc. The only intent there was to illustrate that I wasn't someone who started coding 2 weeks ago and had my mind blown by typing "GPT build me a calculator" into Claude. No intent at all of calling myself a mega-genius, which I don't really think I am. Just someone who likes doing fun stuff with AI.

And, BTW, if you reread my initial comment, you will realize you misread part of it. I said that "Advanced Programming" is the exact opposite of the type of work I am doing.

Look, I'm not trying to dunk on your website for fun. The issue is that you're making a specific argument: you're an experienced developer who uses AI to be 5-10x more productive without downsides, and you properly audit all the code it generates. You then offered your project as evidence of this workflow in action.

The problem is that your project has basic performance issues - FOUC, render waterfalls - that are central concerns in modern React development. These aren't arbitrary standards I invented to be mean. They're fundamental enough that React's recent development has specifically focused on solving them.

So when you say I'm inventing quality standards (in your now-deleted comment), or that this is just a passion project so quality doesn't matter, you're missing the point. You can't argue from professional authority that AI makes you more productive without compromise, use your work as proof, and then retreat to "it's just for fun" when someone points out the quality issues. Either it demonstrates your workflow's effectiveness or it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.

The kids' artwork comparison doesn't work either. You're not a child showing me a crayon drawing - you're a professional developer using your work as evidence in a technical argument about AI productivity. If you want to be treated as an experienced developer making authoritative claims, your evidence needs to support those claims.

I'm genuinely not trying to be cruel here, but if this represents what your AI workflow produces when you're auditing the output, it raises serious questions about whether you can actually catch the problems the AI introduces - which is the entire crux of your argument. Either you just aren't equipped to audit it (because you don't know better), or you are becoming passive in the face of the walls of code that the AI is generating for you.

I will accept for the moment that you are not just being willfully cruel.

Let's talk a little about FOUC and the waterfall. I am aware of both issues. In fact, they're both on my personal TODO list (along with some other fun stuff, like SSR). I have no doubt I could vibe code them both away, and at some point, I will. I've done plenty harder things. I haven't yet, because I was focusing on stuff that my moderators and users wanted me to do. They wanted features to ban users, a forgot password feature, email notifications, mobile support, dark mode, and a couple of other moderation tools. I added those. No one complained about FOUC or the waterfall, and no one said that the site loaded slowly, so I didn't prioritize those issues.

I understand you think your cited issues are important. To be honest, they irk me, too. But no one who actually uses the site mentioned them. So, when forced to prioritize, I added stuff they cared about instead.

> You can't argue from professional authority that AI makes you more productive without compromise, use your work as proof, and then retreat to "it's just for fun" when someone points out the quality issues

You seem to have missed the point of saying "it's just for fun". My point was this: You are holding a week-long project done with AI to professional standards. Nothing ever done in a week is going to be professional level! That is an absurd standard! You are pointing at the rough edges, that of course exist because it was done on the side, as some insane gotcha that proves the whole thing is a house of cards. "This is "dull work"! You should "have done better work" if you wanted to talk with us"! For FOUC?!? C'mon.

Let me see your typical manual piece of work, I'm sure I'll be able to tear it apart in a way that really hurts your ego :)

Is your redesign live for chipscompo? Because if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern. And fair enough, you sound like a backend guy so you can't expect perfection for frontend work. My experience with AI is that it's great at producing intern-level artifacts very quickly and that has its uses, but that certainly doesn't replace 95% of software development.

And if it's producing an intern-level artifact for your frontend, what's to say it's not producing similar quality code for everything else? Especially considering frontend is often derided as being easier than other fields of software.

Yes, it is live. I never claimed to be a god-level designer - but you should have seen what it looked like before. :)

>if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern

The site looks great to me. Your comment is actually offensive, despite you typing "no offence".

I appreciate you saying so.

> Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive

The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case.

If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim to a number of psychological effects (sunk cost, Gell-Manns, slot machine effect) than it is that your productivity has really improved.

Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? If your productivity is now 10x mine (I don't use these tools at work because they are a waste of time in my experience) then why aren't you compensated as such and if it's because of pointy haired bosses, you should be able to start a new company with your 10x productivity to shut him and me up.

Provide links to your evidence in the replies

> Have you received a 5-10x pay increase?

Does Amazon pay everyone who receives "Not meeting expectations" in their perf review 0 dollars? Did Meta pay John Carmack (or insert your favorite engineer here) 100x that of a normal engineer? Why do you think that would be?

I disagree with the parent’s premise (that productivity has any relationship to salary) but Facebook, Amazon etc do pay these famous genius brilliant engineers orders of magnitude more than the faceless engineers toiling away in the code mines. See: the 100 million dollar salaries for famous AI names. And that’s why I disagree with the premise, because these people are not being paid based on their “productivity”.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Carmack was paid 100x more than the average engineer once equity from the acquisition of his company is taken into account.

Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?

The unfortunate reality of engineering is that we don't get paid proportional to the value we create, even the superstars. That's how tech companies make so much money, after all.

If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people.

For some data points, check out levels.fyi and compare the ratio of TCs for a mid-level engineer/manager versus the topmost level (Distinguished SWE, VP etc.) for any given company.

The whole premise of YCombinator is that it’s easier to teach good engineers business than to teach good business people engineering skills.

And thus help engineers get paid more in line with their “value”. Albeit with much higher variance.

I would agree with that premise, but at that point they are not engineers, they are founders! I guess in the end, to capture their full value engineers must escape the bonds of regular employment.

Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.

I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.

Jeez... this seems like another condescending HN comment that uses "source?" to discredit and demean rather than to seek genuine insight.

The commenter told you they suspect they save time, it seems like taking their experience at face value is reasonable here. Or, at least I have no reason to jump down their throat... the same way I don't jump down your throat when you say, "these tools are a waste of time in my experience." I assume that you're smart enough to have tested them out thoroughly, and I give you the benefit of the doubt.

If you want to bring up METR to show that they might be falling into the same trap, that's fine, but you can do that in a much less caustic way.

But by the way, METR also used Cursor Pro and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Cursor had smaller context windows than today's toys and 3.7 Sonnet is no longer state of the art, so I'm not convinced the paper's conclusions are still as valid today. The latest Codex models are exponential leaps ahead of what METR tested, by even their own research.[1]

[1]https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

As they said, it depends on the task, so I wouldn't generalize, but based on the examples they gave, it tracks. Even when you already know what needs done, some undertakings involve a lot of yak shaving. I think transitioning to new tools that do the same as the old but with a different DSL (or newer versions of existing tools) qualifies.

Imagine that you've built an app with libraries A, B, and C and conceptually understand all that's involved. But now you're required to move everything to X, Y, and Z. There won't be anything fundamentally new or revolutionary to learn, but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all). Getting the AI to execute the changes gets you to skip much of the tedium. And even though you still don't really know much about the new libs, you'll get the gist of most of the produced code. You can piecemeal the docs to review the code at sensitive boundaries. And for the rest, you'll paint inside the frames as you normally would if you were joining a new project.

Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.

> but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all).

That is one of the assumptions that pro-AI people always bring. You don't read the new docs to learn the domain. As you've said, you've already learn it. You read it for the gotchas. Because most (good) libraries will provide examples that you can just copy-paste and be done with it. But we all know that things can vary between implementations.

> Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.

You could squeeze a week inside a day the normal way to. Just YOLO it, by copy pasting from GitHub, StackOverflow and the whole internet.

> I am the AI-hater's nightmare...

I-know-what-kind-of-man-you-are.jpeg

You come off as a zealot by branding people who disagree as "haters".

Edit: AI excels at following examples, or simple, testable tasks that require persistence, which is intern-level work. Doing this narrow band of work quickly doesn't result in 10x productivity.

I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.

1. Even for junior level work

Did you see the comment that I was responding to? It said "your intuition is a liar" and said they would only believe me if I was compensated 10x a normal engineer. If that's not the comment of a hater, I'm not sure what qualifies.

> I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.

If my website, a real website with real users, doesn't qualify, then I'm not sure what would. A single person with evidence is right in front of you, but you seem to be denying the evidence of your own eyes.