Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#11

Post by ryandv » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

I don't know. You may as well say that after reading Uncle Bob's Clean Code and adding 50 layers of indirection, you are now writing at "enterprise scale." Perhaps you even hired an Agile SCUM consultant, and now look at your velocity (at least they're measuring something)!

Use my abstract factory factories and inversion of control containers. With Haskell your entire solution is just a 20-line mapreduce in a monad transformer stack over IO. In J, it's 20 characters.

I don't see how AI differs. Rather, the last study of significance found that devs were gaslighting themselves into believing they were more productive, when the data actually bore the opposite conclusion [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#12

Post by netbioserror » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

vemv wrote: post #8

Most likely you are creating boilerplate at 20x/50x, as opposed to genuinely new concepts, mechanisms, etc. To be fair, most web/mobile frameworks expect you to do that. Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.

Precisely what I was going to say. As domain specificity increases, LLM output quality rapidly decreases.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#13

Post by SCdF » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

To be clear you believe that you do a year's worth of work in one week? Every week? So halfway through this year you will have done 25 years of work?

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#14

Post by SecretDreams » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

SCdF wrote: post #13

To be clear you believe that you do a year's worth of work in one week? Every week? So halfway through this year you will have done 25 years of work?

OP has got 200 years of experience under their belt now.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#15

Post by 63stack » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

I so wish just one of these posts with these insane ~20-50x claims would include a narrated video of someone using it, or show us a repository with the code, or anything tangible.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#16

Post by voidUpdate » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

Out of interest, how did you arrive at the 20-50x speedup numbers?

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#17

Post by _philipalan » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

ryandv wrote: post #11

I don't know. You may as well say that after reading Uncle Bob's Clean Code and adding 50 layers of indirection, you are now writing at "enterprise scale." Perhaps you even hired an Agile SCUM consultant, and now look at your velocity (at least they're measuring something )! Use my abstract factory factories and inversion of control containers. With Haskell your entire solution is just a 20-line mapreduce in a monad…

actual lol

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#18

Post by hmokiguess » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

You should be using an agent instead of the browser in-app chat, it can likely improve the efficiency and easiness of performing your workflow by another order of magnitude. Try Claude Code.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#19

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

63stack wrote: post #15

I so wish just one of these posts with these insane ~20-50x claims would include a narrated video of someone using it, or show us a repository with the code, or anything tangible.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#20

Post by ryandv » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

63stack wrote: post #15

I so wish just one of these posts with these insane ~20-50x claims would include a narrated video of someone using it, or show us a repository with the code, or anything tangible.

Yes... I've asked for the same - show us the goods with a Destroy All Software style screencast; otherwise the default position is that this entire HN post is just more AI generated hallucination.

Nobody's taken me up on this offer yet. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325469