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Comment by gzread | Hacker News Reader

Careful though: a lot of people are getting the feeling of getting 20x done. Do you have objective measurements?

In my case is nearer to ∞x. I have developed an opensource Android app which has already ~200 users that I would never ever written in my whole life. Zero experience with mobile development and zero time in my free time to focus on this appropriately to at least try to learn how to do it. I know myself, I would have given up before getting the first dummy APK on my phone. And while it's totally vibe-coded, in the sense that I just prompted CC and not written a single line of Kotlin code, I put a ton of effort on it anyway, on how I want it to behave, how it looks like, squashing all the usual subtle bugs that CC leaves here and there.

Did you prompt it step by step or let it do its thing for a bit?

I've been working on it since December. The first working prototype was a oneshot of a biggish enough prompt (for Opus 4.5). After that well, I didn't save the prompts (my bad) but I have probably prompted what... 2-3k 80-columns lines of English in Claude Code? Yeah, I guess we are in that ballpark. Sometimes it nails the new feature at first attempt, sometimes it takes a few attempts and corrections (and in that case it can definitely be frustrating)

What does it do?

(I'm going to break the rule I had to keep my HN identity separated from my real one with this post but here it goes...)

It's a frontend to the vehicle data served by TeslaMate (a local logger for your EV data), as a more mobile-friendly alternative to Grafana.

How do you even begin to define objective measurements of software engineering productivity? You could use DORA metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is delivered. Or you could use the SPACE Framework [2] which is more about the developer experience.

1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

2. https://space-framework.com/

I don't have time for that mysticism. I just know.

Ha ha, for some of us the "feeling" is good enough.

this is the most self-aware, honest answer IMO

IDK just yesterday I got a complete slide / powerpoint-lite editor in Qt Quick that is sufficient for the use case I have in two prompts, roughly 7 minutes. How long would it take you to write, on your best day, using your favourite programming language ?

For me the evidence is I have completed side projects I never would have before. I also recently started building a game that I had put off for years. At work I am closing more features than historically and at the end of the day not as fatigued. It’s only my experience and everyone’s is going to be different.

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