Comment by skydhash
9 hours ago
> 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"