I see 100x used quite a bit related to LLM productivity. It seems extreme because it implies one could generate a year’s worth of value in a few days. I would think delivering features involves too much non coding work for this to be possible.

But that’s precisely what I’m saying is that what I can do today by myself in a couple of days would have taken me a year with a team of three people

The key limiting factor to any project as somebody else in this thread said was “people alignment are the number one hindrance in project speed”

So 10 years ago if I wanted to make a web application that does complex shit I’d have to go and hire a handful of experts have them coordinate, manage the coordination of it, deliver it, monitor it everything else all the way through ideation storyboarding and everything else

I can do 100% of that myself now, now it’s true I could’ve done 100% of myself previously, but again it took a year of side effort to do it

If 100x was really possible, it would be instantly, undeniably obvious to everyone. There would be no need for people alignment because one lone developer could crank out basically anything less complicated than an OS in a month.

It is starting to become obvious to more and more people. And is it really that hard to believe that a tool can extend your natural abilities by 2 orders of magnitude but not everyone can instantly use it? If fact you’re using one right now. Your computer or phone can do many things orders of magnitude faster than you can do alone, but only until recently most people had no idea how to use computers and could not benefit from this power.

I believe with LLM’s were set to relive the same phenomenon again.

I use it at work everyday. I work with people who use it everyday. 100x is complete and utter nonsense.

100x means that I can finish something that would have taken me 10 years in a little over a month.

It would be obvious not because people are posting “I get a 100x productivity boost”, but because show HN would be filled with “look at this database engine I wrote in a month”, and “check out this OS that took me 2 months”.

And people at work would be posting new repos where they completely rewrote entire apps from the ground up to solve annoying tech debt issues.

You’re missing the point by bike shedding on “100x”

It’s probably higher tbh because there’s things I prototyped to test an assumption on, realized it was O(N^2) then dumped it and tried 4 more architecture simulations to get to one that was implementable with existing tool chains I know

So you’re doing exactly what i called out which is evaluating it as a magic oracle instead of what I said which is that it makes me personally something like 100x more productive as a support tool, which often means quickly ruling out bad ideas

Preventing a problem in architecture is worth way more than 100x

If what you meant by 100x more productive is that sometimes for very some specific things it made you 100x more productive, and that isn’t applicable to software development in general, I can see that.

I have many times delivered a year of value in a few days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to build something instead of just building exactly what someone asked for.

>I have many times delivered a year of value in a few days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to build something instead of just building exactly what someone asked for.

Knowing what not to do more of a superpower than knowing what to do - cause it’s possible to know

You can prototype by hand too. Personally I find it might take me 10 min to try a change with an LLM that would have taken me 30 min to 1hr by hand. It's a very nice gain but given the other things to do that aren't sped up by LLM all that much (thinking about the options, communicating with the team), it's not _that_ crazy.

Sorry, I call bs, unless you were very poor developer without any skills to manage people.

The bottleneck IME is people. It's almost never code. It's getting alignment, buy-in, everyone rowing in the same direction.

Tech that powers up an individual so they can go faster can be a bit of a liability for a company, bus factor 1 and all that.

100x is a bold statement.

You can easily get to 100x in a greenfield project but you will never get to 100x in a legacy codebase.

That depends on the code-base. I've found that hand-writing the first 50% of the code base actually makes adding new features somewhat easier because the context/shape of the idea is starting to come into focus. The LLM can take what exists and extrapolate on it.

> Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim?

Reddit.