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by manmal
21 days ago
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> The best agentic developers are now probably exceeding 100x, doing massive rewrites of codebases that would have taken years of engineering in days I‘m not denying that you can get far with a port of a well tested codebase. But it’s a bit of a selective example, no? Porting a large framework to Rust is not something that’s making up a meaningful fraction of a developer’s time usually. It’s also a bit of a luxury IMO, and something you could have skipped entirely. |
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I will fully admit we have examples of people converting Postgres to Rust, HL2 to wasm, etc. but that’s all porting. The code was there, we’re just translating it, warts and original-languagisms and all.
But even if you’re making a bunch of tiny tools and chaining them together, I can’t see more than a 2-3x sustained increase.
We also have artists that can make games now, and that 0-1 transition sure feels like 100x and maybe it is; but the problem of “starting feels impossible and the barrier is too high” to “I can now actually do something” is not where the 100x developer idea comes from either.
And that 0-1 change asymptotes really quickly to, again, maybe a sustained 2-3x once the artist understands the domain.
So, does the 100x person, who isn’t a novice and who isn’t literally translating existing code from A to B, exist? What are some real world examples?
Edit: I will concede one area: the investigation stage. E.g. “Does this code have an exploit?” I would argue that’s not generating new output (yet), but it is a great deal of work that is simplified and sped up. It’s also where most of my own use of AI speeds me up considerably as a developer.