[hattmall]

>Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x

Yes, absolutely.

>or is there some catch?

Yes, absolutely.

The catch is that to go 10x you have to either do a lot of work of the variety that AI excels at, mainly boilerplate and logical but tedious modifications. There's a lot of code I can write, but I will probably need to check the syntax and implementations for 10 or more functions / methods, but I know what they are and how I want the code to flow. AI never really nails it, but it gets close enough that I can fix it with considerable time savings. The major requirement here is that I, for the most part, already knew almost exactly what I wanted to do. This is the really fancy auto-complete that is actually a pretty reasonable assistant.

The other way is that you have to start from a position of 0.1x (or less) and go to !~1x.

There are a tremendous amount of people employed in tech roles, but outside of actual tech companies that have very very low throughput.

I've recently worked in a very large non-tech firm but one that is part of a major duopoly and is for the most part a household name worldwide. They employ 1000s of software developers whose primary function is to have a vague idea of who they should email about any question or change. The ratio of emails to lines of code is probably 25:1.

The idea that you could simply ask an AI to modify code, and it might do it correctly, in only a day is completely mind blowing to people whose primary development experience is from within one of these organizations.

[godelski]

Okay, I got two questions and I never seem to get satisfactory answers but I'm actually curious.

1) What kind of code are you writing that's mostly boilerplate?

2) Why are you writing code that's mostly boilerplate and not code that generalizes boilerplate? (read: I'm lazy. If I'm typing the same things a lot I'm writing a script instead)

I'd think maybe the difference is in what we program but I see say similar things to you that program the types of things I program so idk

[hattmall]

I could probably be using the word boilerplate wrong, but to me, it's anything that isn't logic. So anything with basic interfaces, interacting with databases, etc is boilerplate. It's not literally the same code every time, but it's the parts of code that I don't have to make a map of how it should work.

E.g. I write financial modeling software, designing the interface, getting data from APIs, pulling transactions from database is all boilerplate. I can write in plain English how that should be done, for me to do it, is to just look up the exact methods / structures / etc. AI can do that pretty well... sometimes.

The hard part is figuring out how to make that information meaningful and take action on it, display it to the user, and make certain there aren't mistakes in the interaction of the previously mentioned areas.