Out of interest, how did you arrive at the 20-50x speedup numbers?
vibes, obviously
Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
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Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#22As other pointed out, you may very well have a more productive setup this way, but providing numbers is rage-bait because we don't know where your baseline come from.
Do you ship 20x more PRs ? Did you solve 20x more bugs ? Did you add 20x more features ? Did you provide 20x more ARR, more values, etc...
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#23I 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
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Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#24Most 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.
There's three types of work in software:
- Commodity work, such as CRUD, integrations, infra plumbing, standard patterns.
- Local novelty, i.e. a new feature for your product (but not new to the world).
- Frontier novelty, as in, genuinely new algorithms/research-like work.
The overwhelming majority of software development is in the first two categories. Even people who think they are doing new and groundbreaking stuff are almost certainly doing variations of things that have been done in other contexts.
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#25Haven't you really tried an agentic code like Claude Code, Codex, AMP...? For "really try" I mean investing some time with it like 10-20 hours min to see the things they are good with and how to use them well. They are tools and have the corresponding learning curve.
I have passed through a phase of copy/pasting from the ChatGPT web to autocomplete tools, but the real feeling of "shit, this is going to really change how I code" came with Claude Code.
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#26But you aren't writing code. You are getting a machine to do it.
That could be said about compiling higher-level languages instead of rolling your own assembly and garbage collector. It's just working on a higher level. You're a lot more productive with, say, PHP than you are writing assembly. I architect of it and go through many iterations. The machine makes mistakes, when I test I have to come back and work through the issues. I often correct the machine about stuff it doesn't…
Not to be too rude, but this looks like a bunch of 2010-style procedural PHP string concatenation spaghetti. Data mappers and ORMs are pretty much a solved problem. Why write your own as part of your platform? If you’re writing this much boilerplate to reimplement solved problems, it’s no wonder you’re able to get a lot of help from an LLM.
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#27I 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.
Sure. Here is my latest 4-hour speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#28If you can do this and you do not build your own company you are wasting your time in some way, IMHO. It has lots of potential. Let me, though, have my own... doubts about it. Thanks for sharing anyway.
I already built 2 companies and building a third.
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#29To 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?
In a sense, yes. If you compare how long it would take me to do it manually about 15 years ago.
Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
#30Thanks for sharing your methodology. And ignore the rude people that it might attract please. I might start using a second LLM to review the diffs. Something like Gemini 3 Fast. Sounds good. But I don't want to give up on a fancy IDE to use browser tabs. So I think I will ask the second LLM to review the `git diff`.
Here is what it looks like, if I were to livestream it for 4 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY