AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x

mytailorisrich

AI has the potential to be extremely powerful but it is also very new. People and organisations are just at the beginning of the learning process.

maleero

10% seems low. I think 1.5-3x is more like it without sacrificing quality. You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.

simianwords

This is very similar to how you can double the employees in a company and only get marginal improvement in productivity. If that’s true, AI gives the same gains doubling labour. No?

mycentstoo

My unsolicited thoughts: * AI will drive additional features as development accelerates * There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers * Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue * Gap closes as AI benefits slow in their impact to feature development and slower adopting companies catch up * Companies that were faster adopters can no longer charge more for additional revenue without giving up market share to now caught-up competitors * New normal is that companies are in a bind - they have to pay for tokens/AI aided development else they lose speed and therefore market share - but the paying is now without additional revenue and exists as a tax Assumptions: * No AGI * LLMs have bounded impact on features * Timeframe is long enough that companies that trail in AI won't be starved out https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iVHmp9F4Rl0

UltraSane

10% is still huge.

horticulturist

The variation in individual developer throughput was as much as 20x pre-AI. 10% is basically nothing. You’d be better off firing your worst performer and replacing them with someone good (or great).

Kuyawa

How long it takes for a seasoned developer to write a full app with database design, full authentication register/login/logout/forgot/session, basic crud for all entities, payment processing, admin dashboard with analytics, recent users, transactions, moderation, etc Usually from 1 to 3 months Now it all can be developed in just 5 mins, add cosmetic changes in just 24 hours and you have a fully functioning app already deployed in production So if that doesn't make you a 10X developer you are not using enough AI

evanmoran

> Our team at DX analyzed engineering velocity from November 2024 to February 2026 In my experience Claude Code only really started to be really strong in December 2025 and most people didn’t notice/adopt it until Opus 4.6, which launched in Feb 2026. So I’d expect quite a different result if measure since then.