A friend of mine who has at most written some SQL joins recently bought a cheap thermal printer on Amazon. The printer was meant to be used with a heavily ad and microstransaction laden app to operate over Bluetooth. He was able to use codex to hook it up to his MacBook and reverse engineer the printer then make a web service so he can print whatever he wants from anywhere.

I agree with you in that I now feel like a 100x engineer, but I think it would have taken me a long time to figure that one out pre AI.

There is something amazing about letting the computer work at something tirelessly until it gets to a working solution.

I’m also amazed at how often I can speed up the process by reviewing progress, inserting my knowledge, stopping it from pursuing dead ends, and redirecting effort. Something that the LLM might have finished in 2 hours can be done in 20 minutes with me paying close attention and intervening.

Yup, OP has domain knowledge in software/security so they knew how to steer. it's like knowing how a rudder can control an aircraft doesn't make you capable of flying one.

The better the models are the less this is true. If the prompt history is smth like “goal: root this tablet” and it did all on its own - then you plumber can 100% achieve same result in same amount of time.

Summer 2026 models are able to fix everything I vibe coded late 2025 that got too unwieldy

I don't think the word "amplification" is accurate. I don't know why, but while engineering techbro circles love "multipliers," but those very very rarely exist in real life.

You do need a baseline of knowledge to be able to prompt the AI in a domain successfully. But beyond that baseline there are rapidly diminishing returns. Someone with skill far beyond a certain line won't get amplified the same way someone who just clears that line will.