[thedevilslawyer]

I sense your comment as saying: "AI is hype, and reality will catch-up.".

But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Reality will catch-up with that too, once the other smoke clears.

[shinryuu]

100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before. I strongly doubt that is happening for an individual.

[mistersquid]

> 100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before.

Reduce your scale: "100x achieves in 1 hour what used to take 1 week."

One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

1 week of work can be reduced to an hour and some change.

[shinryuu]

That requires that you not only one-shot the thing. You will also not have the time to verify the solution yourself in that time period.

Besides 1h what used to to take 1 week is basically 40x given a workweek is 40h.

[freeopinion]

Ignoring the obvious math problem here, I think the broader scope is important. Some of the point from preceding comments is that overall longterm output is not changing. So if somebody is oneshotting a week of work in an hour, but has the same annual output... where are you losing all the normal productivity that should have happened the rest of the week/year?

If one week of work can be reduced to an hour, then you should be able to complete a year's worth of work in 50 hours. If you break that into two 25-hour weeks (because a 40x dev earns the right to loaf?), what is that dev doing for the other 50 weeks in the year? What is making them so incredibly unproductive 50 out of 52 weeks in a year?

[fauigerzigerk]

>One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

In other words, if you include everything that's required to create useful software then 100x turns out to be a fantasy.

[ruszki]

That’s also not possible in “skilled” hands. My output is roughly the same. It does the scaffolding, but I need to rewrite almost every line, because it introduces footguns around that often. And before I had about 20000 LOC it failed even with scaffolding, ie architecture. And it wasn’t taste, just footguns all around, architecture ones. Nowadays for example still introduce mutability or completely unnecessary complexity where it shouldn’t, even when the example code which does almost the same is pristine. Many times it’s like StackOverflow, when a question doesn’t need 90% of the accepted answer, but people happily copy it brainlessly.

This is especially bad with new, or quickly improving frameworks, like Android Compose. LLMs use completely outdated, deprecated APIs all the time, when they are not completely supervised. Or at least, I hope so that the framework causes it. Because if that’s not the case, then your products are fucked.

Also even with the best prompts it could never produce more working code in an hour than what I can produce in a day. Regardless of quality, just “working somehow”. Not even with an uninterrupted session. If that’s the case for some, then there is definitely also a developer skill issue. And so would definitely not trust anything coming out of their “supervision” of an LLM.

[Kudos]

The baseline engineer in that case must really be something incompetent.

[kibwen]

Ironic. The best way to turn 1x engineers into 100x engineers is to reduce the median skill level by 100x.

[vanviegen]

> But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Each of these three sentences are in need of some evidence. I'm not actually seing any signs of software velocity notably increasing anywhere. Except perhaps in the AI-reseller sphere, but that seems mostly due to throwing huge amounts of VC money at it and a lack of quality control.

[koonsolo]

Name a single project that has a 10x increase. I mean real production ready code, not some single person hobby project.

[f17428d27584]

AI is turning 1x engineers into 0.3x engineers claiming to be 100x engineers.

[realusername]

> And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

At my large org (+100 engineers), I'd say it's a mixed bag and the overall impact of AI rollout looks to be slightly negative productivity.

They probably won't say it publicly though.

It's not because some people are more productive with it that all of them are and it certainly doesn't mean that the company itself is more productive either as you have other things than code to take into account.

[pianopatrick]

I can believe that the difference between the slowest programmer in the world and the fastest AI aided programmer in the world is now 100x in terms of lines of code output. Like I can imagine a programmer writing 250 lines of code per week by hand and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

[nunez]

But we spent decades as an industry trying to dispel of the notion that SLOC/KLOC does not matter.

I still believe that. 250 lines of tight code that solves a specific problem in a way that others can maintain will always be better than 25k lines of code that's difficult to review and consume (and, therefore, becoming a liability).

[torben-friis]

>and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

A year of that is 1.3M code: the size of systemd, or postgres.

Can you imagine a single person writing systemd (not a POC, the current version feature complete and battle tested) from scratch in a year? If so can you point me to any such project?

[pianopatrick]

Well, as a thought experiment, I'd say that depends on if the measure is "1.3M lines of production code" or "1.3M lines of code (test code, comments and production code combined)".

I don't think you could get to 1.3M lines of production code, but people say AI agents are good at writing tests. I could imagine that if you had an unlimited budget you could set up agents to generate lots and lots of tests and comments, inflating your weekly total. Like, maybe you can set up an agent to loop against a code coverage tool trying to generate more and more tests to hit MC / DC levels of testing.

In the extreme / absurd case, if you could hit the SQLite ratio of 590x lines of test code vs real code then 25,000 lines of code per week could be 43 lines of production code and 24,958 lines of test code.

You'd be a "100x programmer" in terms of lines of code output, but that would not get you to SystemD levels of production code in a year.

I can't point you to a project taking that route, and I don't have the budget to try it, but I can imagine someone hitting 25k lines of code per week with lots of tests and comments padding the numbers.

I am not sure software written that way would be any good though.

[sph]

I have seen people with that kind of AI assisted productivity-by-volume, building eldritch abominations like Gas Town.

[afdbcreid]

10x? The most generous studies I know give up to a 50% improvement.

[torben-friis]

I'm not say it's pure hype. Not in the sense of previous hype waves like the metaverse or NFCs. It clearly has uses.

I do think it is hype as a killer of knowledge work. It can certainly remove a lot of friction in the kind of borderline mechanical work that you'd formerly outsource to the lowest priced denominator, serve as an idea bouncer, remove friction for bug tracing, etc.

Attempts to cross the next line ("no need for architecture discussions, ai plans", "no need to read the code, ai reviews", and so on), nope.

As someone else mentioned, 100x is a couple days producing the outcomes (remember, not output) of a year. Or for a team, iOS delivering in a single year ten times as many features as its entire previous existence. It's not something that doesn't get noticed.