Comment by AndrewKemendo
1 month ago
> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories"
Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim
> a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces.
This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s been phenomenally useful and 100x my productivity
The gap seems to be between people who never knew how to build, looking for a perfect Oracle that would be like a genie in a lamp, then mad when its actual work
The thing the last few years have beat into me is that most engineers are actually functionally bad engineers who only know 1:1000th of what they should know in order to know how to build a successful project end to end
My assumption was that all of the bad engineers I worked with in person were a accidental sample of some larger group of really good ones (who I’ve also been able to work with over the years) and that it’s just rare to find an actual capable engineer who understands the whole process
Turns out that’s a trivial minority (like every other field) and most people are pretty bad at what they do
I see 100x used quite a bit related to LLM productivity. It seems extreme because it implies one could generate a year’s worth of value in a few days. I would think delivering features involves too much non coding work for this to be possible.
But that’s precisely what I’m saying is that what I can do today by myself in a couple of days would have taken me a year with a team of three people
The key limiting factor to any project as somebody else in this thread said was “people alignment are the number one hindrance in project speed”
So 10 years ago if I wanted to make a web application that does complex shit I’d have to go and hire a handful of experts have them coordinate, manage the coordination of it, deliver it, monitor it everything else all the way through ideation storyboarding and everything else
I can do 100% of that myself now, now it’s true I could’ve done 100% of myself previously, but again it took a year of side effort to do it
If 100x was really possible, it would be instantly, undeniably obvious to everyone. There would be no need for people alignment because one lone developer could crank out basically anything less complicated than an OS in a month.
6 replies →
Sorry, I call bs, unless you were very poor developer without any skills to manage people.
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The bottleneck IME is people. It's almost never code. It's getting alignment, buy-in, everyone rowing in the same direction.
Tech that powers up an individual so they can go faster can be a bit of a liability for a company, bus factor 1 and all that.
100x is a bold statement.
You can easily get to 100x in a greenfield project but you will never get to 100x in a legacy codebase.
That depends on the code-base. I've found that hand-writing the first 50% of the code base actually makes adding new features somewhat easier because the context/shape of the idea is starting to come into focus. The LLM can take what exists and extrapolate on it.
> Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim?
Reddit.