Comment by gtsop
2 days ago
I cringe when I see these numbers. 20 times better means that you can accomplish in two months what you would do in 4 years, which is ridiculus when said out loud. We can make it even more ridiculous by pointing out you would do in 3 years the work of working lifetime (60 years)
I am wondering, what sort of tasks are you seeing these x20 boost?
It is amazing, cringe all you want :)
I scoped out a body of work and even with the AI assisting on building cards and feature documentation, it came to about 2 to 4 weeks to implement.
It was done in 2 days.
The key I've found with working as fast as possible is to have planning sessions with Claude Code and make it challenge you and ask tons of questions. Then get it to break the work into 'cards' (think Jira, but they are just .md files in your repo) and then maintain a todo.md and done.md file pair that sorts and organizes work flow.
Then start a new context, tell it to review todo.md and pick up next task, and burn through it, when done, commit and update todo.md and done.md, /compact and you're off on the next.
It's more than AI hinting at what to do, it's a whole new way of working with rigor and structure around it. Then you just focus fire on the next card, and the next, and if you ever think up new features, then card it up and put it in the work queue.
Did this 20x increase in productivity come with a 20x increase in salary? Do you clock off at Monday lunchtime and spend the rest of the week playing video games? Did your boss fire nineteen developers and give their jobs to you?
If one of these things isn’t true, you’re either a fool or those productivity increases aren’t real.
Being 20x increase in productivity won't come with a 20x money made. Unless you somehow monopoly the extra productivity.
A simple example: if someone patents a machine that makes canned tuna 10 times faster than how they're currently being made, would tuna factories make 10 times more money? The answer is obviously no. Actually, they'd make the same money as before, or even less than that. Only the one who makes such a machine (and the consumers of tuna cans) would be benefited.
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I probably am a fool :)
10x to 20x is in relation to time, so something that would have taken 2 weeks (80 hours) would be done in 8 hours to be 10x.
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You did not answer the question
You are extrapolating over years as if a programmer’s task list is consistent.
Claude code has made bootstrapping a new project, searching for API docs, troubleshooting, summarizing code, finding a GitHub project, building unit tests, refactoring, etc easily 20x faster.
It’s the context switching that is EXTREMELY expensive for a person, but costless for the LLM. I can focus on strategy (planning features) instead of being bogged down in lots of tactics (code warnings, syntax errors).
Claude Code is amazing, but the 20x gains aren’t evenly distributed. There are some projects that are too specialized (obscure languages, repos larger than the LLM’s context window, concepts that aren’t directly applicable to any codebase in their training corpus, etc). But for those of us using common languages and commodity projects, it’s a massive force multiplier.
I built my second iOS app (Swift) in about 3 days x 8 hours of vibe coding. A vocab practice app with adjustable learning profile, 3 different testing mechanisms, gamification (awards, badges), iOS notifications, text to speech, etc. My first iOS app was smaller, mostly a fork of another app, and took me 4 weeks of long days. 20x speed up with Claude Code is realistic.
And it saves even more time when researching + planning which features to add.
> in two months what you would do in 4 years
There should be a FOSS project explosion if those numbers were true by now. Commercial products too.
Claude Code was released 4 months ago, agebtic coding in general really came into being earlier this year. Maybe give it a minute?
4 months but now 10-20x more productive means there should be an explosions of projects! So where is it?
Sure but that would be 40 months with claimed LLM augmentation though. I don't feel it.
We surely shouldn't need a whole minute, 3 seconds should suffice? ;)
Jokes aside, if 20x was on the table for any kind of meaningful work we wouldn't need to wait for much of anything, entire parts of industry would be invented and technically reworked by now. It's most likely ~1.25x for what is mostly trivial work that approaches 95% boilerplate and zero actual design work.
If you read calrain's posts the 20x number is taken from the "fact" that sometimes (not consistently or most of the time) something that was estimated at 2 weeks or 80 hours (who knows what it was and how that number came to be?) took 2 hours instead. That's not just some minor detail; it's just not a sound way of thinking about productivity increases.
Maybe writing made up HN comments?
I am honestly convinced these are AI comments. They fail to answer the question of what sort of work they see the x20 improvements, just like Chatgpt fails to answer my hard technical questions.
It isn’t ridiculous, it’s easily true, especially when you’re experienced in general, but have little to no knowledge of this particular big piece of tech, like say you’ve stopped doing frontend when jquery was all there was and you’re coming back. I’m doing things with react in hours I would have no business doing in weeks a couple years ago.
I am waiting to see your 4 year human-equivalent project in a couple of months.
Words without actions are junk. You are asserting something you have no proof for. Proove it then. Amaze us all with your productivity, out in the open. Shred those pilled up open issues on open source projects and then give us a report of how fast-easy it.
If it is "easily true" you'll be done by next month
I don’t need to prove to you something I experience daily, both professionally and in hobby side projects. You can take my anecdotes or you can keep believing me and people like me are wrong, your choice.