Comment by thephyber

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.