Re:100x Developers
by zadjii on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @01:37PM
(#50456853)
This is a point that I think folks miss a lot in these discussions.
I've seen my own raw code output increase by more that 100%, and that's after human review to make sure it's not just slop, before sending it to the rest of the team for review. And we're all doing that. We're all shipping way more code than ever before.
But I don't think our number of users is changing dramatically at all. "Engagement" (or however else you want to measure usage) isn't something that's gone up by the same factor.
\<half baked thought>
I think the simple explanation is this: there is finite "attention". Digital products cost nothing[^1] to copy and ship. They can scale to your maximum amount of users with the same cost to write. And now that cost to write is →0.
But attention hasn't increased by the same factor. People still spend exactly the same amount of time in front of their PCs. Orders of magnitudes of additional features aren't going to actually result in orders of magnitudes more usage.
Maybe there's some hypothetical product that could gain such an advantage in the market that it would fully displace all other entrenched players. Maybe a new application category might come to exist (agentic engineering applications come to mind).
But us being 10x faster at building out features doesn't mean there's suddenly 10x more supply. That's the smoke and mirrors of it all. What does being 10x faster actually get you?
<even less baked>
The logical outcome would be to spend 90% less on the cost center (engineering), to retain the same productivity, right? That's a accounting view of the world, one that can't account for the institutional capital that's built from human collaboration, and redundancy from having more maintainers of a project. But that seems like the only way this ends up working. Trading 10 engineering payrolls for 1 engineer and (<9 engineering payrolls) worth of tokens.
[^1]: perfectly spherical vacuum approximation, of course
I've seen my own raw code output increase by more that 100%, and that's after human review to make sure it's not just slop, before sending it to the rest of the team for review. And we're all doing that. We're all shipping way more code than ever before.
But I don't think our number of users is changing dramatically at all. "Engagement" (or however else you want to measure usage) isn't something that's gone up by the same factor.
\<half baked thought>
I think the simple explanation is this: there is finite "attention". Digital products cost nothing[^1] to copy and ship. They can scale to your maximum amount of users with the same cost to write. And now that cost to write is →0.
But attention hasn't increased by the same factor. People still spend exactly the same amount of time in front of their PCs. Orders of magnitudes of additional features aren't going to actually result in orders of magnitudes more usage.
Maybe there's some hypothetical product that could gain such an advantage in the market that it would fully displace all other entrenched players. Maybe a new application category might come to exist (agentic engineering applications come to mind).
But us being 10x faster at building out features doesn't mean there's suddenly 10x more supply. That's the smoke and mirrors of it all. What does being 10x faster actually get you?
<even less baked>
The logical outcome would be to spend 90% less on the cost center (engineering), to retain the same productivity, right? That's a accounting view of the world, one that can't account for the institutional capital that's built from human collaboration, and redundancy from having more maintainers of a project. But that seems like the only way this ends up working. Trading 10 engineering payrolls for 1 engineer and (<9 engineering payrolls) worth of tokens.
[^1]: perfectly spherical vacuum approximation, of course