alt Hacker NewsI’d love to hear from engineers who find that faster speed is a big unlock for them.
The deadline piece is really interesting. I suppose there’s a lot of people now who are basically limited by how fast their agents can run and on very aggressive timelines with funders breathing down their necks?
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> I’d love to hear from engineers who find that faster speed is a big unlock for them.
How would it not be a big unlock? If the answers were instant I could stay focused and iterate even faster instead of having a back-and-forth.
Right now even medium requests can take 1-2 minutes and significant work can take even longer. I can usually make some progress on a code review, read more docs, or do a tiny chunk of productive work but the constant context switching back and forth every 60s is draining.
I won't be paying extra to use this, but Claude Code's feature-dev plugin is so slow that even when running two concurrent Claudes on two different tasks, I'm twiddling my thumbs some of the time. I'm not fast and I don't have tight deadlines, but nonetheless feature-dev is really slow. It would be better if it were fast enough that I wouldn't have time to switch off to a second task and could stick with the one until completion. The mental cost of juggling two tasks is high; humans aren't designed for multitasking.
If it could help avoid you needing to context switch between multiple agents, that could be a big mental load win.
The idea of development teams bottlenecked by agent speed rather than people, ideas, strategy, etc. gives me some strange vibes.
it's simpler than that - making it faster means it becomes less of an asynchronous task.
current speeds are "ask it to do a thing and then you the human need find something else to do for minutes (or more!) while it works". at a certain point at it being faster you just sit there and tell it to do a thing and it does and you just constantly work on the one thing.
cerebras is just about fast enough for that already, with the downside of being more expensive and worse at coding than claude code.
it feels like absolute magic to use though.
so, depends how you price your own context switches, really.
The only time I find faster speed to be a big unlock is when iterating on UI stuff. If you're talking to your agent, with hot reload and such the model can often be the bottleneck in a style tuning workflow by a lot.