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