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Comment by keeganpoppen | Hacker News Reader

that's just not even remotely my experience. and i am ~20k hours into my programming career. ai makes most things so much faster that it is hard to justify ever doing large classes of things yourself (as much as this hurts my aesthetic sensibilities, it simply is what it is).

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I've never seen a human estimate their "programming career" in kilohours. Is that supposed to look more impressive than years? So, you've been programming only about 7 years? I guess I'm at about "170 kilohours".

As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a far more honest metric about how much time you've spent actually programming.

Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

I personally would only measure my experience in years, because it's approaching 3 decades full-time in industry (plus an additional decade of cutting my teeth during school and university), but I can certainly see that earlier on in a career it's a useful metric in comparison to the 10,000 hours.

> Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

So your logic is that the grandparent specified hours because they spent that many hours specifically programming, and not by just multiplying the number of years by the number of hours in a year?

I don't know exactly how they arrived at their 20k hours figure, all I'm saying is that it didn't seem a controversial way of expressing their experience level, and assumed it was intended to be a comparison to the typical 10k hours needed for mastery of a craft.

I think it’s probabky because of the malcom gladwell “ten thousand hours” idea.

Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or will not conform to.

Yeah, I also highly value consistency in my projects, which forces me to keep an eye on the LLM and steer it often. This limits my overall velocity especially on larger features. But I'm still much faster with the agent. Recent example, https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 -- this took me a couple of hours pairing with Claude code, which is insane give the size of the work here. Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain, integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering

then have ai write a deterministic transformation tool that turns it into the specific style and standard that is needed

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