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Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.

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If people are realistically a baseline of 10x more productive where are all the features, games, applications, SAAS’s that are suddenly possible that weren’t before?

Windows 11

AI might be 100x faster than me at writing code - but writing code is a tiny portion of the work I do. I need to understand the problem before I can write code. I need to understand my whole system. I need to test that my code really works - this is more than 50% of the work I do, and automated tests are not enough - too often the automated test doesn't model the real world in some unexpected way. I review code that others write. I answer technical questions for others. There is a lot of release work, mandatory training, and other overhead as well.

Writing code is what I expect a junior or mid level engineer to spend 20% of their time doing. By the time you reach senior engineer it should be less (though when you write code you are faster and so might write more code despite spending less time on it).

I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that before AI ~0 junior/mid level devs spent just 20% of their time programming. At least not at tech companies

Every company I've worked for that is the case. Note that I divided a lot of the work out that might be counted as coding though.

My experience is very different. A junior should be spending >90% of their time coding, a mid level about 75% and a senior about the same. It only really splits after that point. But the senior spending 25% more time on the wrong thing is worse than than them spending 25% less time on the right thing.

It’s only when you get to “lead” (as in people manager) or staff (as in tech unblocked) you should spend the rest of your time improving the productivity of someone who spends more of their time coding than you do.

They're out there. I've noticed a surge of Show HNs right here. A lot of it is vibe coded.

I would like to see GitHub's project creation and activity charts from today compared to 5 years ago. Similar trends must be happening behind closed doors as well. Techy managers are happy to be building again. Fresh grads are excited about how productive they can be. Scammers are deploying in record time. Business is boomin'.

It's likely that all this code will do more harm than good to the rest of us, but it's definitely out there.

Being a 100x developer means you can work just 1% of the time you used to work, right?

Think of some 100x folks you know of. Are they working more or less than before?

They sure as hell don’t make 100x more. Maybe from ads they serve selling AI/productivity snake oil.

>Think of some 100x folks you know of.

This mythical class of developer doesn't exist. Are you trying to tell me that there are a class of developers out there that are doing three months worth of work every single day at the office?

It's odd that kind of developer doesn't exist, but that type of CEO does. Maybe we need to replace CEOs with AI.

When the expectation is 100x, then it is work 100% of the time at maximum speed.

And that brings us back to square one - if everyone is a 100x engineer, then everyone's again a 1x engineer. Lewis Carroll nailed it with the Red Queen's Race.

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