The analogy here would be : a kid who wants a toy but does not have money. So he keeps dreaming how he some day would get that toy and how he would play with it and how it would make him happy, but times goes by and he still does not have money to get that toy. Then suddenly along comes LLM and you have infinite money to buy you all the toys that you wanted, you get them, but you now don't have time to play with them. Because time is money and just like before you didn't had time to "buy" the toys, now that you have them you still have no time to play with them.

> I could have accepted people saying "I'm 20% more productive", which is an incredible achievement by itself, but not the 10x, 20x, 100x I keep hearing about. I think I've read 200x this week.

The ratios are factual though. Just look at the "Insights" tab of any LLM written project. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulse

This kind of velocity is impossible to achieve manually.

That’s a measure of lines of code, I suspect the parent is talking about what results those LOC create.

AI built me a 1.5k+ LOC react component which is probably a 15x increase on the file size I would have created, with negative impact on the project for those extra LOC.

velocity - maybe. usefulness? Maybe even easier. As they say data is not information. Commits are not (necessarily) anything useful.

> where are the 100 year improvements in the status quo of software?

Most software work is just churn / doing the same thing over and over. More productivity can just mean more output, not better output.

I've heard people use the same word, I was dubious but they did produce some stuff, yet I think that it ends up as an itch-project. You're satisfied you saw the thing emerge into existence but that's about it. No more drive after that. Maybe because LLM don't require you to have a real long term intense need for that thing.

This is exactly my experience. A month of excitement building something that I wouldn’t have had time to do myself, then something broke in the setup and my motivation didn’t extend to fixing it.

I’m only back at it four months later and I don’t really know what happened before, or why it’s working now, I’m just happy that I can scratch that itch again.

I think using AI often feels faster than it is because you put less thought and effort into the problem yourself.

Another possibility is that the people who experience these 100x productivity increases are honest, correct, and simply had abysmal productivity which has now been increased to near-average junior levels thanks to AI.

The variance is extreme though. Thanks to Claude Code and Codex I've been able to make several non-trivial internal tools and libraries without writing much in terms of code, just some reviews here and there.

I spent a couple of days on those, and its would have taken me months to write manually I am sure, so in that regards it's close to 50x.

I've also had Claude track down some logic issue in a module I was unfamiliar with which had very large and complicated flows. Would have taken me many days, since I did not have a reproducible case, so had to go by logs and customer description alone. I spent 5 minutes writing a prompt and when I checked back, Claude had identified the issue. The fix I had to implement myself, but was fairly easy. So there Claude definitely was a 100x increase in productivity.

Then there are cases where they're much more modest, or where they might even be negative, when they think they're fixing stuff but actually are introducing more bugs.

Hey, traditional hand coder fellow ... the times have past and the future is already a present. I never have been this productive before, and it's been ~20 years that I spent coding. System level programming. Few years back I would have said the bottleneck is not in spelling out the code so we wouldn't see that much AI impact but boy I was wrong. Writing code has never been this cheap, both in terms of time resources and $$$. Now I can iterate over the ideas I didn't have the capacity before, both intellectual and time-wise.

> I never have been this productive before

So, what are you doing/ have done with all your productivity?

writing code by hand of course /s

Enjoying free time that otherwise I wouldn't have. Building stuff that otherwise I wouldn't have time or resources for.

You can accept what you like, but it's true. Our team and our business is incredibly more productive. The number of new valuable customer facing features, and the number of PRs (which represent REAL work, not taking a PR and splitting it into 200 PRs game) have all increased dramatically. We've shipped something like ~10x more PRs so far this year than all last year. And we've done that without increasing the number of bugs and outages.

Great, number go up. Have the features led to actual customer growth, or just increased productivity?

Yes lots and lots of growth.