Comment by davnicwil

> Most people I know cite +20%-40% velocity

Seems roughly right, that does seem to be about the boost in the most well-suited cases where you essentially know exactly how to solve the problem, the problem won't change much, and it's truly a matter of just churning out the implementation.

In that case precisely prompting, doing the review & nudge loop, can be a pretty nice (nice, still not game changing) speed boost over literally typing out the code to match the design in your head.

The less optimistic view though is that most things you build aren't like that. Even if they seem like it first. These things get booked as a nice speed boost, but you'll only find out much later they weren't.

A confounding factor is that it seems like many people not in the detail of building software do seem to think of most to all things are like that, even before AI assisted coding. Not much need to say more - see the entire history of the 'agile' movement for evidence of this.

And because most things aren't like that, I actually struggle to see fundamentally how more than 20-40% will ever be achieved (short of the ever-present deus ex machina of AGI argument), simply because the generation is already really good for these types of things. So since things like this aren't going to increase in overall proportion of things to be done, I don't see where the overall extra gains come from by models improving at this point.