I've been doing software engineering for 20 years and approximately half of my total work output has been in the last 2 years. Once you get it set up and maintain it regularly it's easily three to ten times faster

Two to three days of up front planning results in a 100x plus productivity gain. Honestly at this point writing code is no longer a blocker for me, it’s more how many agents can I keep running at the same time, how much time can I spend testing and verifying products, etc…

If you have to ask this at this point, I can’t imagine a comment someone could reply that would cause you to update your priors.

I used cursor for a project built on a framework with a huge API that I hadn't studied exhaustively. I used a similar workflow with grok for the planning and composer for the implementation. You have to be vigilant, ask questions about the plan, inspect every line of output, and ask for do-overs. At the end I estimated that I would have needed 5-6 months without the coding agent instead of six weeks. I didn't develop as much knowledge of the API as I would have without the coding agent, but I doubt that my employer would have knowingly accepted a longer schedule in exchange for my education. It's not just junior engineers who are going to miss out with coding agents.

It genuinely astonishes me that there are still people such as yourself on HN asking this question.

I understood there were still people asking this 12 months ago. But still?

You could only possibly be doubting the time savings if you simply haven't used agentic development, whether Claude Code or other.

You have to understand, by now you basically sound like someone asking how much time you could be saving by writing in Python, instead of just jumping right in and coding assembly yourself.

If you're still asking the question, you just need to bite the bullet and try it.

At first, maybe not much. But when you're properly set up, it's amazing to watch it cook.

Why not give it an honest shot and see for yourself?

A lot.