Man I really thought this was satire. It’s phenomenal that you can gain 10x benefits at all layers of the stack, you must have a very small development team or work alone.

I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time. I may be able to generate code 10-20x faster, but there are nuances that only a human can reason about in my particular sector.

I use Claude Code a lot, but I don't understand these "I'm doing 10X the work" comments.

I spend a lot of time reviewing any code that comes out of Claude Code. Even using Opus 4.6 with max effort there is almost always something that needs to be changed, often dramatically.

I can see how people go down the path of thinking "Wow, this code compiles and passes my tests! Ship it!" and start handing trust over to Opus, but I've already seen what this turns into 6 months down the road: Projects get mired down in so much complexity and LLM spaghetti that the codebase becomes fragile. Everyone is sidetracked restructuring messy code from the past, then fighting bugs that appear in the change.

I can believe some of the more recent studies showing LLMs can accelerate work by circa 20% (1.2X) because that's on the same order of magnitude that I and others are seeing with careful use.

When someone comes out and claims 10X more output, I simply cannot believe they're doing careful engineering work instead of just shipping the output after a cursory glance.

You must be using it wrong, because I'm getting 100x the work done and currently at 1.5 million MRR with this SAAS I vibe coded over the weekend.

After I solved entrepreneurship I decided to retire and I now spend my days reading HN, posting on topics about AI.

Mind if I use this as a copypasta for the future? This checks off every point people bring on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

In all seriousness though, writing code, or even sitting down and properly architecting things, have never been bottlenecks for me. It has either been artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis. I have often stated and stand by the assertion that I develop at the speed of my own understanding, and I think that is a good virtue to carry forth that I think will stand the test of time and bring about the best organisational outcomes. It's just a matter of finding the right place that values this approach.

Edit for context: My team is an ops team that needed a couple developers; I was picked to implement some internal tooling. The deadlines I was given for the initial development are tied directly to my performance evaluation. My boss has only ever been a manager for almost two years. He has only ever had development headcount for less than a year. He has never been on a development team himself. The man does not take breaks and micromanages at every opportunity he gets. He is paranoid for his job, thinking he is going to be imminently replaced by our (cheaper) EU counterparts. His management style and verbal admonitions reflect this; he frequently projects these insecurities onto others, using unnecessarily accusatory speech. I am not the only developer on my team who has had such interactions with him. I have screenshots of conversations with him that I felt necessary to present to a therapist. This degree of time pressure is entirely unprecedented in my 20 year career. Yes, this is a dysfunctional environment.

It’d be cool to see your process in depth. You should record some of your sessions :)

I mostly believe you. I have seen hints of what you are talking about.

But often times I feel like I’m on the right track but I’m actually just spinning when wheels and the AI is just happily going along with it.

Or I’m getting too deep on something and I’m caught up in the loop, becoming ungrounded from the reality of the code and the specific problem.

If I notice that and am not too tired, I can reel it back in and re-ground things. Take a step back and make sure we are on reasonable path.

But I’m realizing it can be surprisingly difficult to catch that loop early sometimes. At least for me.

I’ve also done some pretty awesome shit with it that either would have never happened or taken far longer without AI — easily 5x-10x in many cases. It’s all quite fascinating.

Much to learn. This idea is forming for me that developing good “AI discipline” is incredibly important.

P.s. sometimes I also get this weird feeling of “AI exhaustion”. Where the thought of sending another prompt feels quite painful. The last week I’ve felt that a lot.

P.p.s. And then of course this doesn’t even touch on maintaining code quality over time. The “after” part when the LLM implements something. There are lots of good patterns and approaches for handling this, but it’s a distinct phase of the process with lots of complexities and nuances. And it’s oh-so-temping to skip or postpone. More so if the AI output is larger — exactly when you need it most.

I mean at this point can we just conclude that there are a group of engineers who claim to have incredible success with it and a group that claim it is unreliable and cannot be trusted to do complex tasks.

I struggle to believe that a ton of seemingly intelligent software engineers are too dumb to figure out how to use Claude code to get reliable results, it seems much more likely to me that it can do well at isolated tasks or new projects but fails when pointed at large complex code bases because it just... is a token predictor lol.

But yeah spinning up a green fields project in an extensively solved area (ledgers) is going to be something an AI shines at.

It isn't like we don't use this stuff also, I ask Cursor to do things 20x a day and it does something I don't like 50% of the time. Even things like pasting an error message it struggles with. How do I reconcile my actual daily experience with hype messages I see online?

I'm getting 1,000x improvement building notepad applications with 6 9s. No one is faster.

Need some help selling these notepad apps, do you have a prompt for that?

I'm still reviewing all the code that's created, and asking for modifications, and basically using LLMs as a 2000 wpm typist, and seeing similar productivity gains. Especially in new frameworks! Everything is test driven development, super clean and super fast.

The challenge now is how to plan architectures and codebases to get really big and really scale, without AI slop creating hidden tech debt.

Foundations of the code must be very solid, and the architecture from the start has to be right. But even redoing the architecture becomes so much faster now...

> and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented

I'm just curious, why do you "have to"? Don't get me wrong, I'm making the same choice myself too, realizing a bunch of global drawbacks because of my local/personal preference, but I won't claim I have to, it's a choice I'm making because I'm lazy.

> fact I can't run Opus locally

Yet

> If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong.

What is “using it right”? You wrote claims, but explain nothing about your process. Anything not reproducible is either luck or lie.

> And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade

You sound like a pro wrestler. I'd like to know what "hard-hitting" engineering work is. Hydraulic hammers?

I read this as satire. I still think it is.