100x Developers

scottious

we measure productivity compared to 1960s-era punch card programming, obviously. I'm a 10000000x developer

kaycebasques

> Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours. Re: 100x productivity that's still not technically correct (the best form of correct), is it? 3 hours is 180 minutes. Agent would have to get it done in 1.8 minutes.

dude250711

What is this curious scaling obstacle that is preventing them from going to 1000x+?

hmry

One thing I never understood about the "Nx Engineer" trope is if it's supposed to mean "one team member who achieves as much as N average team members", "one solo dev who achieves as much as an average N-person team", or "one solo dev who achieves as much as N average solo devs". Those seem like wildly different scales, and it seems like everyone who talks about it means something different.

makingstuffs

> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change No, no it isn't.

deathanatos

> I bet they are measuring lines of code, MRs or deployments. My previous employ was at one point being courted by an AI coding agent company to push their agent on us, internally; after a trial period, they sent us pretty graphs show us the "increase in productivity", which as TFA correctly guesses, was MRs. I double checked the numbers, and … the books were cooked. This was pointed out and "oh it was some bug in the script we use that's all fixed now" but of course, … the graphs weren't regenerated or corrected. (And also, of course, the correction would not have been in their favor.) So of course the (now known to be bad) data continued to be an input into decision making. (Which TBF to AI, making decisions on suddenly conjured data before or even after it has been verified has been a thing long before AI.)

amelius

Does the 100x refer to the boredom of these developers?

dvh

Even before ai I've seen 0.1x programmers. If 10x programmers exists and we normalize 0.1x programmers to 1x, then 10x became 100x.

nylonstrung

100x employees are real, they look like a 20x employee in a market where comp is 20% of a major US city

TrackerFF

The original definition was difference between the best and the worst performers in a organization. Not the best and the average. It was also in the context of specific tasks.

pona-a

In case some contrarian climbs out of the woodwork to yell "umm aktually it's just a metaphor! nobody would actually think that", let me introduce you to Garry Tan and his 100x AI dev [0]. | Task type | Human team | AI-assisted | Compression | |-----------------------------|-----------|-------------|-------------| | Boilerplate / scaffolding | 2 days | 15 min | ~100x | | Test writing | 1 day | 15 min | ~50x | | Feature implementation | 1 week | 30 min | ~30x | | Bug fix + regression test | 4 hours | 15 min | ~20x | | Architecture / design | 2 days | 4 hours | ~5x | | Research / exploration | 1 day | 3 hours | ~3x | [0] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/ETHOS.md

krmmalik

Maybe 100x is a massive stretch for people who are already developers but for non-coders like me the difference is almost infinite because I went from not being able to code at all to now having something that can work. 0 to infinity essentially.

iLoveOncall

Yeah, when AI bros talk about 10x or 100x developers, they're always talking about the input metrics (how many CRs, how many tickets, etc.), but never about the output metrics (revenue or profit growth, customer acquisition, cost savings, etc.). I don't think there's a single claim of increased productivity thanks to AI that I've seen that held under scrutiny. It's all smoke and mirrors. On a side note, this sentence is extremely funny to me: "Super small or specific task. Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours". Even when the author tries to make the case for AI, he's only able to reach a 18x multiplier, far from the 100x boasted by people.

SkyeCA

> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change. No matter how much I earn my lifestyle stays the same. Rejecting lifestyle inflation has been the single best thing I've done in my life. Speaking of salary though, I bet if I become this mythical 100x AI powered developer I won't see even a 2x salary increase.

fedpost

Okay we are not fucking starting this shit again. Have we learned nothing?

apical_dendrite

My company has a huge problem where a junior engineer will complete tasks very quickly and appear to be extremely productive, but they're just hiding tech debt that has to be cleaned up later. That clean-up doesn't get factored into any assessment of the original developer's productivity. Fixing the system once it's been working and has live data takes a lot longer than it would have taken to build it right the first time. For example: storing an API key in a plain text JSON preferences object that many different parts of the system read and return to users. Determining if there was a breach, figuring out who to talk to at the third-party company to get the key rotated, etc takes time. The person doing that work doesn't look very productive because they aren't shipping a lot of code that impacts customers. The developer who put the API in plain text looks like a 10x engineer because they shipped a customer-facing feature really quickly.

evklein

> I think 10x is crazy, altho in some cases it might be attainable. 100x is just a figure of speech. It’s just not possible. Pretty fair - I think anyone who has developed the sensation of becoming their own bottleneck understands this. And yes, if you can simply be twice as productive as you were prior to LLMs, then that is an improvement. What I worry about is that that multiplier will become a criteria for staying employed. I.e. if you were a 1x developer, and now you're a 2x, why would a company keep you in position knowing they could instead hire someone who's 5x, 10x, 100x, etc. They might feel like they are losing out. This is all relative.

bob1029

> Super small or specific task. > Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours I think human in the loop is the only way to achieve this. I've never seen the robot reduce the complexity of a problem space. Multiagent might seem like the obvious path to 100x but I think the exact inverse is true.

d_silin

There must be an equivalent of Amdahl's law for AI-assisted development. "You can get 100x speedup on the 90% of your development tasks, but remaining 90% of them take the same amount of time with or without AI"

danielciocirlan

> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change. Lifting 10x my maximum PR on dead-lift goes from 160kg to 1.6T. A means of transportation 10x faster is arriving in 9 minute what it took 1.5h Avg. vertical jump for an male adult is 45cm. 4.5m if you 10x it. The 10x income is the only comparison that makes sense. In Nassim Taleb’s words, this is the only Extremistan metric, obeying power laws, “Bill Gates walks into a bar”-style. The others are Mediocristan metrics - obeying Gaussians, exceedingly rare to get even slightly above the highest/lowest ever seen. With that lens, being _effective_ (knowing the right thing to produce) can definitely 100x your value output with AI, no matter how _efficient_ (quantity per hour worked) you can become.