Comment by calrain

2 days ago

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.

    • The conclusion there, and here, is that canning tuna ten times faster doesn’t increase productivity by ten times (because the there’s other limiting factors). Or: No software project was ever late because the typing took too long.

  • 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.

    • Which means you should be perfectly capable of answering two of the three scenarios the other user posed:

      > 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?

      In other words, how are you taking advantage of all that extra time you claim to have?

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