For personal projects, 10x is a lower bound. This year alone I got several projects done that had been on my mind for years.

The baseline isn't what it would have taken had I set aside time to do it.[1] The baseline is reality. I'm easily getting 10x more projects done than in the past.

For work, I totally agree with you.

[1] Although it's often true even in this case. My first such project was done in 15 minutes. Conceptually it was an easy project. Had I known all the libraries, etc out would have taken about an hour. But I didn't, and the research alone would have taken hours.

And most of the knowledge acquired from that research would likely be useless.

I accept there are productivity gains, but it's hard to take "10x" seriously. It's such a tired trope. Is no one humble enough to be a meager 2.5x engineer?

From one personal project,

Last month:

  128 files changed, 39663 insertions(+), 4439 deletions(-)
  Range: 8eb4f6a..HEAD
  Non-merge commits: 174
  Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-04 → 2026-01-04 (UTC)
  Active days (non-merge): 30

  59 files changed, 19412 insertions(+), 857 deletions(-)
  Range: c8df64e..HEAD
  Non-merge commits: 67
  Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-28 → 2026-01-04 (UTC)
  Active days (non-merge): 8

Don't worry, it's an LLM that wrote it based on the patterns in the text, e.g. "Starting a new project once felt insurmountable. Now, it feels realistic again."

Numbers don't matter if it makes you "feel" more productive.

I've started and finished way more small projects i was too lazy to start without AI. So infinitely more productive?

Though I've definitely wasted some time not liking what AI generated and started a new chat.

Just as a personal data point, are you a developer? Do you use AI?

One of my favorite engineers calls AI a "wish fulfillment slot machine."

Username checks out

I think it depends what you are doing. I’ve had Claude right the front end of a rust/react app and it was 10x if not x (because I just wouldn’t have attempted it). I’ve also had it write the documentation for a low level crate - work that needs to be done for the crate to be used effectively - but which I would have half-arsed because who like writing documentation?

Recently I’ve been using it to write some async rust and it just shits the bed. It regularly codes the select! drop issue or otherwise completely fails to handle waiting on multiple things. My prompts have gotten quite sweary lately. It is probably 1x or worse. However, I am going to try formulating a pattern with examples to stuff in its context and we’ll see. I view the situation as a problem to be overcome, not an insurmountable failure. There may be places where an AI just can’t get it right: I wouldn’t trust it to write the clever bit tricks I’m doing elsewhere. But even there, it writes (most of) the tests and the docs.

On the whole, I’m having far more fun with AI, and I am at least 2x as productive, on average.

Consider that you might be stuck in a local (very bad) maximum. They certainly exist, as I’ve discovered. Try some side projects, something that has lots of existing examples in the training set. If you wanted to start a Formula 1 team, you’re going to need to know how to design a car, but there’s also a shit ton of logistics - like getting the car to the track - that an AI could just handle for you. Find boring but vital work the AI can do because, in my experience, that’s 90% of the work.

> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive

I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.