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by nerptastic 69 days ago
Man I really thought this was satire. It’s phenomenal that you can gain 10x benefits at all layers of the stack, you must have a very small development team or work alone.

I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time. I may be able to generate code 10-20x faster, but there are nuances that only a human can reason about in my particular sector.

5 comments

Senior engineer with 25 years of experience here. I wish I spent enough time actually coding that 10x-ing my coding productivity would matter much to my job. Most of my day is spent wrangling requirements, looking after junior devs, stamping out confusion brush fires before they get out of control, and generally just trying to steer the app away from a trainwreck down the line.

When I do code, it's almost always something novel that I don't know how I'm going to implement until I code a few pieces and see how they fit together. If it's a fairly routine feature based on an existing pattern, I assign it to one of the other devs.

This is basically the thing I keep coming back to with the agentic tools. It is the wrangling requirements, stamping out confusion, and steering away from a trainwreck down the line that are the actual challenging parts of the job and we can't automate those yet. Once you do actually know the code change you want to make though it is pretty nice to change it 10x faster than before.
I noticed that too. At start. It vaguely reminded me of the famous Navy SEAL copypasta.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?
I see some confusion from your downvotes. Sean cited the start of "navy seal copypasta"

The Navy Seal copypasta is a internet meme consisting of an absurdly over the top tough guy threat, posted to mock someone who is acting somehow aggressive, insecure, or self important online, usually after a minor argument.

Here it's full text:

>What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

> I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time.

In my experience, the people who 10X their output with Claude Code fit one of two categories:

1. They're not really taking the time to understand the code they're submitting. They might do a skim over the output and see that it looks reasonable and passes tests, but they aren't taking time to understand the code as if they were pair programming. Only when it breaks and the LLM can't patch it up quickly do they go in and fully understand the code.

2. They moved very slowly before Claude Code. I've had some coworkers who would take 2-3 days to get a simple PR out because, to be frank, their work days weren't full of a lot of work. Every time they'd run into a question they'd stop and then bumble around for a few hours until they could talk to the ticket creator about it. They'd get tired of working on a task by 2PM and then save the rest of the work for tomorrow. They'd get an idea and decide to rewrite the PR the next day, and on and on with distractions. When they start using Claude Code the LLM doesn't have the same holdups, so now every time where they were getting stuck or tired before is replaced by an LLM powering through to some solution. Their cognitive load is reduced so they're no longer freezing up during the day. They aren't really becoming 10X engineers like they think, but really just catching up to normal pace

I don't know if we're all 10x'ing but our entire org is shipping PRs using an in-house framework akin to Stripe's Minions [1] and many of those PRs are generated from Slack. We definitely have work to do on the latter part of the SDLC to have more confidence in these changes but we can still rely on the existing observability layer to make sure things are working as expected.

Another commenter mentioned that Docker, git, etc. were all tools that greatly enhanced productivity and coding agents are just another tool that does that. I would agree, but argue that it's more impactful than all of those tools combined.

[1] https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-...

Regarding point #2, while it is of course entirely possible that they are slackers it is more likely that they lack the knowledge you are leveraging in order to declare that the PRs are "simple"
It's simpler actually: author trying to make a business developing AI product.
Yes, and he's shilling in almost every thread. This is tiring.
It is satire! They have been doing this bit for a while and people keep falling for it lol