Re:You'll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents
by greenowl on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:21PM
(#50384613)
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.
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.