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

A lot.

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

There is no way on earth that you've done more in two years than in 18 years before that. It's not even a remotely believable claim.

I'm just going by github, which has captured the majority of my work since 2007, and says my prior peak was in the ~800 contributions per year, and this year so far I've done 5k+. Not always comparable but close enough I feel comfortable saying "at least 3x"

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.

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.

Seemed like a reasonable ask. So far, a couple people said 3x to 4x. One said 100x. Big jump. I guess it depends on your baseline coding ability before AI.

No, it's nothing to do with your baseline coding ability, and everything to do with the type of task.

If it's the kind of thing that requires a lot of iterative back-and-forth, like tweaking UX design, then there may be little speedup.

If it's the kind of thing where you there is a clear pass/fail, e.g. writing software to satisfy a comprehensive test suite that is black and white, then it could be 1000x.

The better-defined the task is and the more the agent can evaluate its own success, the bigger the multiplier.

Also, obviously, the more you are working in an area that is more unfamiliar to yourself, the bigger the multiplier.

That's why one morning I'll feel like it's maybe just 3x as it's constantly testing an app in an iOS simulator to see if a UX bug got fixed. That afternoon it might be 10x as it works on some pure code fixes that I still need to verify manually if they work. The next morning it might be something like 200x as I have an incredibly well-defined task that requires a lot of algorithmic research and 10,000 lines of code, but where the end result is easily provably correct or not. That afternoon it could be 1,000x as it fixes a problem in a programming language I'm not even familiar with, in a domain it would take me months to get up-to-speed on, in a library I don't know, which solves a bug that is blocking me. At that point it might as well be infinite x, because it's just not something I could have realistically done at all.

So it's incredibly task-dependent. But it's pretty much always faster to some degree.

Yes very much this. Minor detail of UX sometimes is a time loss with agents.

I caught myself recently explaining something like "resize the top element 30% and move the bottom element up 10%" (except it was slightly more complex).

After a few iterations of that I thought "what are we doing here? I could adjust a single value in the CSS instead of writing complete sentences!". The problem was, then I'd have to go dig up the values and see how it was laid out, which might take more time then writing the sentences. Its still crazy though.

On the other hand, the basic layout was done in 2 minutes instead of half a day so there was that.

In my experience if you are willing to let go and let Claude, then you’ll get sped up in UI stuff.

But if you’re working with a designer and you’re trying to get the agent to get every little thing pixel perfect, they are still complete ass at image understanding at that level. But they can get the broad strokes generally correct.

Seems like more contrived examples than not.

For the generic / average developer pushing SaaS features out on their company's webapp how much faster is it, really?

They are a force multiplier. Unfortunately for my bargain bin offshore strategic partner contractors who were a negative force to begin with, they are now negative 100xers.

Contrived? I don't see it.

For the generic average dev pushing SaaS features, it's way faster. For the kind of stuff where the coding is essentially all boilerplate/connector, something like Claude shines. Because there's already a pattern for everything in the codebase.

If you are able to parallelize your work, e.g. work on 2 or 3 features at a time, your coding time goes down to essentially zero, or rather the time it takes you to write the prompts (hint: use dictation if you're working from home), and all your work is now spent on all the same design and manual testing you were doing before. So depending on what proportion of your time was spent on design/testing vs. writing actual code before, your generic/average dev can see a productivity boost of anywhere from 2x to 20x. It really just depends on what proportion of their job they actually spend literally writing code.

Pre AI a developer would come out of a product meeting knowing at a high level of what to build. Maybe a few key bullet points get written up in an issue tracker somewhere, but beyond that there's no additional design phase, highly detailed specifications curation, prompting, planning back and forth with an agent etc. A good dev has an intimate pre-existing understanding of the codebase, and immediately can just move to the actual implementation (writing code). The plan is in their head, and can go directly to code. And there's no huge agent written code diff to review at the end, and any manual testing happened along the way as code was manually written.

And FWIW, I'm not arguing against a productivity boost. I've tried the tools. But for me, it was nowhere near 10x, especially when working through a brand new feature or module. Maybe 2x-3x? Though even that seems generous in some cases. And you give up a lot to get that boost with changing the way you work.

Agreed it's higher and probably closer to a 5x-10x for some boilerplate copy/paste duplication or extension of an already existing feature.

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

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.

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

I've used Claude Code. It produces no time savings.

Surely you must understand that that sounds as believable as "I've used programming languages. They produce no time savings over assembly language."

If you post something like that, all it says is that you're either trolling or don't know what you're doing.

There are some very specific areas where it might not help, just the same as there are times where writing assembly is still better.

So what exactly is your motivation in saying "It produces no time savings"? Something so obviously false? I just don't get it.

None whatsoever. The boosters are, frankly, lying to themselves and/or to others.

If you've ever been in a meeting that's devolved into coding standards you'll believe me when I say I'd choose writing an agents.md every time