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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

#31

Post by EGreg »

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.

Yes, there is A LOT of boilerplate that is sped up by AI. Every time I interface with a new service or API, I don't have to carefully read the documentation and write it by hand (or copypaste examples), I can literally have the AI do the first draft, grok it, test it, and iterate. Often times the AI misses latest developments, and I have to research things myself and fix code, explain the new capabilities, then the AI can be used again, but in the end it's still about 20x faster.

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

#32

Post by EGreg »

eloisius wrote: post #7

Can you say anything about where you were five years ago? Or how your ability to write and ship code from 2015 to 2020 changed? It’s hard to believe all these 50x AI productivity claims, especially without an idea of what that multiplier applies to and what the right side of the equation even means. Is it lines written, dollar amounts of impact, pull requests merged?

Yes, you can follow my code from 5 and 10 years ago here:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform-History-v1

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform-History-v2

And you can see the latest code here:

https://github.com/Qbix

Documentation can be created a lot faster, including for normies:

https://community.qbix.com/t/membership-plans-and-discounts/...

My favorite part of AI is red-teaming and finding bugs. Just copypaste diffs and ask it for regressions. Press it over and over until it can't find any.

Here is a speedrun from a few days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

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

#35

Post by EGreg »

voidUpdate wrote: post #16

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

Cherrypicking the most tedious parts, like boilerplate to get up and running, or porting code to other adapters (making mysqlite and postgres adapters for instance)

This was done in about 3 hours for instance: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf...

You can see the speed for yourself. Here is my first speedrun livestreamed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

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

#37

Post by conception »

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.

I get 10-20x done but that’s because most of what I need to get done isn’t particularly difficult.

E.g. I have an aws agent that does all my devops for me. It isn’t doing anything insane but when I need to investigate something or make a terraform change, I send it off and go do something else. I do similar things 20-100 times a day now. Go write this script, do this report, update this documentation, etc.

I think if you are a high level swe it takes a lot of effort to get “better than doing it myself”. If you have a more generalist role, AI is easily a 10x productivity booster if you are knowledgeable about using it.

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

#38

Post by hu3 »

EGreg wrote: post #30
hu3 wrote: post #9

Thanks 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

thanks. I'll take a look later

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

#39

Post by readthenotes1 »

chrisjj wrote: post #4
EGreg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That could be said about compiling higher-level languages You write the program as source code. Prompting an LLM to cobble together lines from other people's work is not writing a program.

"You write the program as source code."

His language is LLM prompts. If he can check them into git and get reasonably consistent results if he ran the prompts multiple times, just like we expect from our JavaScript or C or assembly or machine code, I don't see the problem.

I knew a guy who could patch a running program by flipping switches on the front panel of a computer. He didn't argue my C language output 'is not writing a program'...

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