Comment by alasdair_
9 hours ago
Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.
That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year.
AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.
I haven't yet seen anyone with a concrete example project (public ideally, but even describing private efforts in enough detail to enable potential criticism would be fine) making a claim as strong as 10x. Are you willing to break the mould and show us what we're all missing?
10x what? 10x revenue? 10x features shipped? Whats the measure, is it 10x speed of dev like parent comment? Because an unqualified 10x could mean 10x SLOC which is trivial with an agent but has negative value.
Assuming 10x on the speed of dev, Is the vscode repo a decent example? Recently they've been all in on AI augmented development so i'm thinking they'd be a reasonable subject?
How do you isolate out what counts as the "development" part of their delivery cycle (is that the dev inner loop, does that show up in frequency of commits then?) to measure it and see if it's running 10x?
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/contributors?from...
Its 10x code generation with .5x quality at best and all other parts of the SDLC are at 1.x or worse.
AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.
Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.
It's more like ∞x (or N/Ax if you prefer) because the majority of the projects I did with LLM agents wouldn't have existed without them, because I would've never found enough time to work on them.
One of the latest things I made with Claude was a tool that allowed me to move a bunch of very low traffic Cloud Run services to a single VPS without losing any of the Cloud Run benefits such as easy Docker-based deployment and automatic certificate provisioning. I thought about making something like that for quite some time, and Claude finally made it possible, which makes me quite happy.
The fun thing here is that no other soul genuinely cares about it, or any other code I might publish. The code, especially AI generated, is so cheap that if anyone wants to repeat my steps to get rid of Cloud Run services, they will probably vibe-code their own tool instead of figuring out how to use mine, just like I did that instead of spending time on learning Dokku or similar solutions.
So, yes, 10x and more, but no one cares about the result, which makes the whole 10x measurement less useful.
The incredulity at 10x claims is often unearned because how much do these skeptics actually notice and appreciate the depth of work of ten developers collaborating on something (if not their own org)? Dev output slips by quietly. There are reams of unnoticed projects even at the scale of a life’s work.
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I'm building an open source Google Photos alternative. Have a look at my project and tell me if you think you could do all this at the same speed without an LLM: https://opennoodle.de
Direct github link: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery
It doesn't completely blow away your argument, but you forked Immich and gave it to a LLM. Which is arguably slightly easier than starting from scratch.
Nothing wrong with forks though.
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I am building a better interface for managing KNX systems than the ETS6 software. Code is here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/koolenex
1. I would not have attempted this without AI assistance because it's a big project.
2. I have built a functional program that I am able to use for real work in a handful of weeks, working part time on this (like literally a few hours per day prompting Claude and Kimi).
3. Had I decided to do this without AI assistance it would have been months of work.
I can state one thing that I'm sure a lot of people connect with, and I don't know if this is 10x, probably not.
I've always been a backend engineer, never front end. And almost every team I've been on has lacked any front end skills at all, so all our tools end up being a mash of scripts, maybe sometimes an API.
Now we are all front end engineers creating UIs for things we could never do before, and this starts API first development, so the CLI + UI are just calling APIs. Nothing new here, but this used to be what teams do, now a single person does it.
It would not have taken you long to learn frontend if you wanted to. Now you can use AI to generate it but you don't understand any of the generated code.
Here is a public project.
https://github.com/KeibiSoft/KeibiDrop
It took me 2 years ago around 2k hours to build a cross platform FUSE vault, without using AI assisted tools.
The pain was debugging through logs and system traces. And understanding how things work.
Now managed to ship this one much faster, as an after hours project. Started it in may 2025, and around end of November 2025 started using claude on it.
Just by dumping logs into claude, and explaining the attack vector for the problems, saved me the FML moments of grindings walls of syscalls on 3 platforms.
I would say much easier to progress, and ship with the same rigour, minimize my time, focus and brain power involvement such that I can put the energy somewhere else.
Yep, the real strength of AI is less in replacing engineering skills, it's more in slashing all the time we spend not using those skills and doing low level research and data correlation tasks instead. Which isn't to say that those tasks aren't valuable in their own way, but in terms of raw output...
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My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production.
Complete frontend + backend + database.
Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.
Does that count as an example?
(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)
I can describe private efforts about a couple recent projects that made me finally believe that Claude Code can actually be a 10x multiplier on certain work.
We decided to integrate our SaaS into Microsoft Business Central and NetSuite as plugins into those systems. BC has its own programming language, called AL, that has a lot of idiosyncrasies from any other language I've worked with. And NetSuite plugins are written in SuiteScript, which is a custom JS runtime with a ton of APIs to learn.
In the "before", it would've taken 5 developers a year or more to build those integrations. I did both by myself in well under a year. Thank you Claude.
I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade.
When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.
I'm not sure those are great examples. Why not just consider normal apps?
I don't think we'll see AAA game velocity change until asset generation progresses quite a bit, not to mention stuff like rigging. Even then, there's still a layer between code and engine where you have to wire everything together which an LLM will struggle with.
Replacing some old COBOL is probably more of a management decision based on appetite for change and politics rather than development speed.
Aren't there some measurable things like github repo creation, PRs, app store additions, etc. that can be correlated to LLM adoption? Didn't Show HN have to get throttled after LLMs arrived?
I think your answer is the reason why. LLM performance is fine when applied to everything they can do.
Take LLM out that safe space and suddenly they are no silver bullet, in fact they are unless.
So of course those making the 10x claim mean in the safe space where LLM can handle all activities required. You can’t have it both ways 10x and difficult and confusing tasks for LLMs.
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I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?
The main point of mythical man month was that communication cost across people was the main cost as project grow in complexity.
So increasing individual output by itself is not enough to affect the argument. It could, if you also reduce the size of people needed for a project, where people are everyone included in the project, not just SWE. But there are strong forces in large orgs to pull toward larger project sizes: budgeting overhead and other similar large orgs optimize for legibility kind of arguments.
IMO the only way this will change is when new companies will challenge existing big guys. I think AI will help achieve this (e.g. agentic e-commerce challenging the existing players), but it will take time.
That is far from proven, 'far' being the keyword here in another understanding.
At _this_ moment, AI is in the state of producing things - if you like with factor 10 or more. But what will come afterwards, when all this mush of code shall create _reliable_ results. This means not man month then, rather man years or decades to fix this billion and maybe trillions lines of opaque probabilistic LOC. You have to take the mean of these two stages, if nothing qualitative happens to the models.
Conversely, the value of software has dropped to 1/10 of what it was before Claude code existed.
I’m being glib, but there’s a whole class of software (eg simple crud apps) that just don’t have any marginal value anymore. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 10X faster or 100X faster. 100 x $0 is still 0.
You mean the price of software, as well as the cost. The value (to the user) is the same if not more.
Unless the user just vibe-codes their own version.
Which is what I’m seeing at my job. All of these “afternoon vibe code” projects never actually get users because everyone just vibe-codes their own.
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So there's input (prompts/requests/tokens), then there's outputs (lines of code) and there's outcomes. How much have the outcomes improved? Not just yours, but I'm more curious on the outcomes with regards to the actual need your projects are solving.
First counterexample that comes to mind: Rails vs 90s networked/shared line-of-business crud app development was a 10x factor. It also enabled a lot of internal tools that wouldn't have been worth doing without it.
But after people's expectations adjusted it was just back on the treadmill.
I don't think we've found a new steady-state yet, but I have some gut feeling guesses about where it's going to be.
Ah, Fails. "Before we made x improvement, the app had to restart 400x a day, now it's only 10x!"
For all the complaining we do about "enshittification", we (Hackernews, the broader industry, whatever), are perfectly willing to pay the price of stability and performance to get a little development speed. That's one prong of how enshittification happens. "I can make compromises in the quality of my product because time to market is the one thing, the only thing that matters in this move-fast-break-things economy—and pass my savings on to the customer (in the form of hidden costs)!"
90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.
In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).
So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)
In particular if that steady-state requires 4 to 40GB blob of binary code to be installed or an internet connection to an AI SaaS provider and a credit card.
I remember when coding was free as in beer and freedom!
This was true as programming languages evolved too. It was so much easier to write scripting languages than C. You could crap out scripts like crazy - no cc refusing to give you a binary to get in your way.
Clearly..it still wasn't a silver bullet. Because output as a metric is a bad one. I thought it was only one managers valued..but apparently Anthropic has convinced devs to value it finally? i guess it def hits that dopamine receptor hard.
10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.
There are sizes of projects where it's true, and that size is growing.
And 20x the bugs.
I too can vastly increase my speed of development when I stop caring about the quality.
Doesn’t necessarily but does sometimes unless you have a concrete alternative
How are you defining speed of software development?
How is that not the same thing?
Most of my work has been in core infra at large companies. Having the code written faster does not change rollout velocity all that much... It does help with signals and idiot proofing on bugs but when things break and cost real (very real) dollars AI is not an explanation. In that instance, its not even close. Development might be 10-20 percent of the actual work to get a change out.
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Code is always easy to multiply fruitlessly, always has been.
Features are harder to show the limits of, but have you ever had a client or boss who didn't know what they wanted, they just kept asking for stuff? 100 sequential tickets to change the contrast of some button can be closed in record time, but the final impact is still just the final one of the sequence.
Or have you experienced bike-shedding* from coworkers in meetings? It doesn't matter what metaphorical colour the metaphorical bike shed gets painted.
Or, as a user, had a mandatory update that either didn't seem to do anything at all, or worse moved things in the UX around so you couldn't find features you actually did use? Something I get with many apps and operating systems; I'd say MacOS's UX peaked back when versions were named after cats. Non-UX stuff got better since then, but the UX (even the creation of SwiftUI as an attempt to replace UIKit and AppKit) feels like it was CV-driven development, not something that benefits me as a user.
You can add a lot of features and close a lot of tickets while adding zero-to-negative business value. When code was expensive, that cost could be used directly as a reason to say "let's delay this"; now you have to explain more directly to the boss or the client why they're asking for an actively bad thing instead of it being a replacement of an expensive gamble with a cheap gamble. This is not something most of us are trained to do well, I think. Worse, even those of us who are skilled at that kind of client interactions, the fact of code suddenly being cheap means that many of us have mis-trained instincts on what's actually important, in exactly the way that those customers and bosses should be suspicious of.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
At Microsoft I wrote a feature to support customer setting a preferred AZ for their database. Took a couple weeks as a side project. Nearly 2 years later it reached customers
Extreme example, but exemplifies point
"nine women can't have a baby in a month". Speed of software development is not pure output.
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Writing code is a part (sometimes a big part, sometimes not) of delivering software to production. The overall system throughput is the interesting thing to look at.
The disconnect here is a lack of proof that your increase in personal output actually increases the speed of software development. Considering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule as a joking, but true fact of how software projects go, does AI skip that 2nd 90%? Or do we add a whole new bottleneck of review and corrections, and still need to code that last 90%?
When I measure software dev, delivery of code isn't even a metric I care about. It is a key part of the process, to be sure, but I care about results - Did we ship? Did it work? Do we have happier customers and a smaller bug list?
In my experience, while I can answer "yes" to those questions on people who use AI assistance surgically, applying it where its strengths lie... I can answer an emphatic "No" for the teams I've worked with who are "AI-first", making the AI usage itself part of their goals.
You’re describing output while the essay is discussing productivity.
If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before.
Has your salary increased 10x?
> If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before. Has your salary increased 10x?
That's too simplistic because the rest of the economy isn't static. Everyone is getting access to AI tooling, if the whole field gets a productivity increase then the baseline changes, you don't just become 10x more valuable. The previous work is now way less valuable than it was before. It's also not clear to me that the productivity gains from AI convert 1:1 into profit gains
I don't believe the 10x claims, but since when has salary been any indication of productivity?
Productivity is a value measured in dollars. So if you’re 10x more productive, someone somewhere is making 10x the $ value from your output.
You should expect this to be reflected in the labour market somewhere. Maybe not your own salary, but in somebody’s salary.
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Salary stays the same. A bunch of others are fired. You’re expected to produce their level of output as well as your own. After all, you’re 10x more productive now?
I guess the follow up question to this is “have nine of your colleagues been fired?”
Salary has had weak correlation to productivity gains since last century.
AI is certainly able to increase coding speed, especially for experienced engineers who can design the analytical parts themselves (data structures, interfaces, invariants, and process), but in large projects and/or organizations, queuing theory (especially as understood by lean development practitioners like Don Reinertsen) is going to be nasty.
Lean development theory teaches us that in a multi-workstream, multi-stage development process, developers should be kept at roughly 65-75% utilization. Otherwise, contra-intuitively, work queue lengths increase exponentially the closer utilization gets to 100%. The reason is that slack in the system absorbs and smooths perturbations and variability, which are inevitable.
Furthermore, underutilization is also highly comparable to stock market options: their value increases as variability increases. Slack enables quick pivots with less advance notice. It builds continuous responsiveness into the system. And as the Agile Manifesto tells us, excellent software development is more characterized by the ability to respond to change than the mere ability to follow a plan. Customers appreciate responsiveness from software vendors; it builds trust, which is increasing in value all the more with the rise of AI.
But AI-driven development threatens to increase, not decrease individual engineer utilization. More is expected, more is possible, and frankly, once you learn how to guardrail the AI and give it no trust to design well analytically, the speed a senior engineer can achieve while writing great code with AI assistance often feels intoxicating.
I think we're going to go through a whole new spat of hard, counterintuitive lessons similar to those many 1960s and 70s developers like Fred Brooks and his IBM team learned the hard way.
This seems like somewhat of a mischaracterization. He contrasted improvements in software with improvements in hardware, saying we'd never have something like a Moore's law for software where performance doubled or cost halved equally rapidly. Churning out software faster doesn't mean it's any better.
We also seem to fall into these ruts of not understanding what is meant by labor productivity. When an economist is presenting the common outputs / inputs measure, they don't mean raw quantity of output. They're talking about the value added by outputs divided by the value of inputs. Churning out software faster that doesn't earn anybody additional revenue is not making us more productive. It's disheartening that even c-suites with business education don't seem to understand this. That's not to say there is no productivity gain. Plenty of AI-adjacent hyperscalers are seeing ridiculous growth right now, but no non-startup is seeing revenue 10x what it was the year before, not even NVIDIA.
A lot of this is just basic diminishing marginal utility. There is only so much value to be added. Software is usually either a semi-automated controller or human decision making augmenter to some kind of physical manufacturing process, or entertainment, when we talk about ultimately delivering value. Everything else is an intermediate input. We can only be so entertained. For physical goods, we have food, space, clothing seemingly at a sufficient level to satisfy just about everyone, with the reasons for value not being maximized having to do with distribution. Unless your software manages to solve borders, bigotry, cultural incompatibility, poverty, mental illess, physical illness, violence, I'm not sure what the other big rocks are. Software can absolutely be a key part of infrastructure to facilitate distribution. That's exactly what the Internet is, along with all the backend business and logistics systems out there in existence. But without hitting the true big rocks, where is the 10x value supposed to come from? We're talking incremental gains simply because we're not in the dark ages any more and incremental gains are all that's there. Short of Star Trek style replicators and transporters, I'm not sure what could realistically multiply global value by 10.
Without the value, then sure, you may be churning out 10 times as many discrete projects used by at least one person, or 10 times as many lines of code, but that was never the point. Your personalized notes and grocery ordering apps you share with your wife might excite you for a few weeks, but I can assure you they aren't going to revolutionize your life.
Oh spare me! Anyone can "output" 10x more code. Fred knew you could slap 10x more people on a team and "output" 10x more code.
What this article explains is why despite your feelings of untouchable success, on average the experience of using software just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, making this the worst era for software quality that I've ever lived through
Didn't we already do this with every company looking to hire "rockstar programmers"? I don't recall that that ended well.
I've been thinking about this and have wanted to discuss it with people. I think the 10x thing has been broken, but I don't think it's because the premise of "No Silver Bullet" was false - I think it's because LLMs have the ability to navigate some of the _essential_ complexity of problems.
I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, etc etc etc.
The fact that LLMs are able to wrestle with essential complexity means that using them is going to push us further and further from the actual problems we're trying to solve. Right now, it's the wrestling with problems that helps us understand what those problems are. As our organizations adopt LLMs that are able to take on _those_ problems - that is, customer problems, not problems of data, scaling, and so forth - will we hit a brick wall where we lose that understanding? Where we keep shipping stuff but it gets further and further from what our customers need? How do we avoid that?
For your sake I hope that your pay is determined by your “output”, and not your long-term usefulness.
> that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.
> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.
Those are not the same.
You can add 5 different features to a project and still provide less value that the 5 lines diff that resolves a performance bottleneck.
I agree with this sentiment but I think LLMs are really close to the Brooks idea of a silver bullet.
I don't know if, overall, it's a 10x improvement or 6x or 14x but it's a serious contender. Part of it is the LLMs are very uneven in their performance across domains. If all I build is simple landing pages, it might be a 100x improvement. If I work on more complex, proprietary work where there aren't great examples in the training data then it might be a 10% improvement (it helps me write better comments or something)
All available evidence points to it being an incremental improvement at best. Higher claims are attributable to the psychological effect of the AI sycophancy problem which erases the Dunning-Kruger effect and makes even experts extremely overconfident.
You still have to read the output of your LLM. Learning by reading alone and not doing is not nearly as effective.
"claude, connect to a k8s pod in prod and grab a 30s cpu profile, analyze and create a performance test locally for the top outlier, verify your fix and create a PR"
Just because code has been put out does not mean the software is “developed”.
10x would only be possible if your output was low before Claude Code
I've found that I can have 10x output, so long as I don't expect anyone to review your code...
I can get 100x output, if we're counting lines of code!
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Horses weren't replaced overnight.
Also, I know that there will be a lot of boilerplate applications that just don't look good or seem to have been well thought out early on.
Folks will use that as a cope mechanism, but huge changes are coming.
The premise of "no silver bullet" is wrong (LLM just made it clear, but it has always been wrong).
The premise is that the software development had been mostly "essential complexity" rather than "accidental complexity." But I think anyone who worked as SE in the past decade would have found the opposite is true.
It's not only that software development is full of accidental complexity. Programmers (and the decision makers above them) have always been actively creating accidental complexity. Making a GUI program hasn't gotten easier since Visual Basic. In fact for each JavaScript framework and technique that wraps around DOM render engine, it has got harder over years. Until LLMs made it easier again (by creating a permanent dependency on LLMs. If you intend to edit the code manually afterwards, it became even harder!)