I can see why people are skeptical devs can be 10x as productive.
But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.
But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.
I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on
Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.
Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.
Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.
But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.
In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?
The point of my comment was:
"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".
The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.
And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.
>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.
True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.
It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.
What happens when you sign up?
A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.
Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
What happens when you upvote or downvote?
CRUD says “increment a counter.”
Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
What happens when you add a comment?
CRUD says “insert record.”
Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.
What happens when you post a URL?
CRUD stores a string.
Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.
Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.
But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.
You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.
However, I do think 1 week is ambitious, even for a bad clone.
> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
> etc...
The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time
So as we have established, it's not even a basic Reddit clone.
And anyone who says they can build one in a week is giving HN a bad reputation.
And I have a pretty decent career behind me as a aoftware developer and my peers percieved me as kinda good.
2. Copying an existing product should take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to evolve the original.
3. I glanced at some of the Moltbook comments which were meaningless slop, very few having any replies.
Anyone could insert themselves AI or not. Anyone could post any number of likes.
This isn't a Reddit clone. This is Reddit written by Highschoolers.
This is, like, not the industry's first run-in with "this makes you 10x more productive!"
Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ )
There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review.
Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.
I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capable of writing small pieces well. More complicated asks tend to produce unnecessarily complicated solutions, ones that may “work,” on the surface, but don’t hold up in practice. I’ve seen a large increase in small bugs with more AI coding assistance.
When I write code, I want to write it and forget about it. As a result, I’ve written a LOT of code which has gone on to work for years without touching it. The amount of time I spent writing it is inconsequential in every sense. I personally have not found AI capable of producing code like that (yet, as all things, that could change).
Does AI help with some stuff? Sure. I always forget common patterns in Terraform because I don’t often have to use it. Writing some initial resources and asking it to “make it normal,” is helpful. That does save time. Asking it to write a gen server correctly, is an act of self-harm because it fundamentally does not understand concurrency in Erlang/BEAM/OTP. It very much looks like it does, but it 100% does not.
tldr; I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
It excels at this, and if you have it deeply integrated into your workflow and IDE/dev env the loop should feel more like pair programing, like tennis, than it should feel like its doing everything for you.
> I also primarily write Elixir,
I would also venture that it has less to do with the language (it is a factor) and more to do with what you are working on. Domain will matter in terms of sample size (code) and understanding (language to support). There could be 1000s of examples in its training data of what you want, but if no one wrote a commment that accurately describes what that does...
> I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.
This is spot on. I stopped thinking of it as "AI" and started thinking of it as "power tools". Useful, and like a power tool you should be cautious because there is danger there... It isnt smart, it's not doing anything that isnt in its training data, but there is a lot there, everything, and it can do some basic synthesis.
I used to complain when my friends and family gave me ideas for something they wanted or needed help with because I was just too tired to do it after a day's work. Now I can sit next to them and we can pair program an entire idea in an evening.
I think that's what is missing from the conversation. It doesn't make developers faster, nor better, but it can automate what some devs detest and feel burned out having to write and for those devs it is a big win.
If you can productively code 40 hours a week with AI and only 30 hours a week without AI then the AI doesn't have to be as good, just close to as good.
Last night I was working on trying to find a correlation between some malicious users we had found and information we could glean from our internet traffic and I was able to crunch a ton of data automatically without having to do it myself. I had a hunch but it made it verifiable and then I was able to use the queries it had used to verify myself. Saved me probably 4 or 5 hours and I was able to wash the dishes.
FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc.
I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.
The only historical analogue of this is perhaps differentiating a good project manager from an excellent one. No matter how advanced, technology will not substitute for competence.
The evangelist response is to call it a skill issue, but looking around it seems like no one anywhere is actually pushing out new products meaningfully faster.
Maybe at a startup it is, but for any established company I find most of the friction is systemic management issues.
Oh well
A 1x engineer may become a 5x engineer, but a -1x will also produce 5x more bad code.
In many cases the quantity of output is good enough to compensate, but quality is extremely difficult to improve at scale. Beefing up QA to handle significantly more code of noticeably lower quality only goes so far.
If this were true, we should be seeing evidence of it by now, either in vastly increased output by companies (and open source projects, and indie game devs, etc), or in really _dramatic_ job losses.
This is assuming a sensible definition of 'productive'; if you mean 'lines of code' or 'self-assessment', then, eh, maybe, but those aren't useful metrics of productivity.