Before AI 10x was this mythical thing people talked about… except that it wasn’t rare. There were 10x beginners. There were experienced 10xers who lied about it because they didn’t want to get stuck doing other people’s work.

In the corporate world how do you become a 10x developer without AI? Simple, don’t repeat the same stupid shit everyone else does and write your own tools. That’s it. It’s simple because software only serves one purpose: automation. If people aren’t thinking in terms of labor elimination it’s so easy to be 10x whatever it is they do.

But, in all fairness most developers in the corporate world, at least on the web side, are barely capable of programming. They rely on open source packages and large frameworks to do almost everything. If you want to be 10x that then just don’t do that. Being a good programmer is helpful but not required. More important than competence or skill is not being cowardly about writing original code.