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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

#81
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?

50x more code? Absolutely plausible. 50x more ideas implemented, or 50x better ideas? Doubtful. Generating code doesn't generate value.

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

#82
Anyone else just thoroughly sick of this AI bullshit? I feel like after this post OP probably went and fapped to their portrait. Lets be real here. If AI is making you "50x faster" you're probably not working on hard problems.

Surely we've reached peak hype now and it will start to get better? Surely...

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

#83

There's a small but seemingly tireless brigade of "you're not actually moving faster, you're just fooling yourself" pundits on this site that feel compelled to chime in every time someone mentions that they get any benefit from AI coding tools. I'm just not going to engage with them anymore. That said... I jumped to a few random moments in your video and had an "oh my god" reaction because you really were not kidding…

"it doesn't make sense" is an odd statement to make for choosing Claude Code vs Cursor. Would you be willing to go into more detail about that claim?

Happy to!

CC seems best suited to situations where one or both of the following are true:

- presence of CI infrastructure

- the ability for the agent to run/test outputs from the run loop

If you're primarily working on embedded hardware, human-in-the-loop is not optional. In real terms, I am the CI infrastructure.

Also, working on hardware means that I am often discussing the circuit with the LLM in a much more collaborative way than what most folks seem to do with CC requirements. There are MCP servers for KiCAD but they don't seem to do more than integrate with BOM management. The LLMs understand EE better than many engineers do, but they can only understand my circuit (and the decisions embedded in it) as well as I can explain/screencap it to them.

The SDK and tooling for the MCUs also just makes an IDE with extensions a much more ergonomic fit than trying to do everything through CLI command switches.

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

#84
post #41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have a legacy code-base in mind? I'd happily demonstrate this kind of workflow on my day job if not for company trade-secrets. That's as legacy as it gets, 20+ year old code base with several "strata" of different technologies and approaches. Claude Opus handily navigates around it, and produces working bug fixes with minimal guidance. I'm not going to claim it's 20x or 50x yet, there's still navigation and ba…

Hi eterm, this is very relevant to me as I'm building a self-hosted open-source tool for legacy code comprehension (AI/ML final project).

You mentioned "navigation and babysitting", could you share what that looks like in practice? Do you have to spend time reconstructing context or correcting Claude's misunderstandings? Do you still need to interrupt colleagues for some tacit knowledge, or has that changed?

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

#85

There's a small but seemingly tireless brigade of "you're not actually moving faster, you're just fooling yourself" pundits on this site that feel compelled to chime in every time someone mentions that they get any benefit from AI coding tools. I'm just not going to engage with them anymore. That said... I jumped to a few random moments in your video and had an "oh my god" reaction because you really were not kidding…

Isn't Claude Code the same as Cursor agent mode? I really don't get why anyone would want to lock yourself to one LLM creator in the former vs having all the LLMs in the latter. How do you stop yourself from bursting through the quota with Opus? That's my biggest worry and it keeps me from using it over Sonnet in my Cursor.

Honestly, it depends on what you mean by "the same as". Both are (in my case, at least) running Opus 4.5 instances. After that, it's like using a CNC or a shop full of hand tools. They are both great, and people who know one often know both. The process is wildly different, however.

Not busting my quota is simply not my top priority. I'm on their $200/month plan and I have it locked to a $1000/month overage limit, though the most I've ever gone through using it every day, all day is about $700. That probably sounds like a lot if you're optimizing for a $20/month token budget, but it's budgeted for. That $10-12k/year is excellent value for the silly amount of functionality that I've been able to create.

Sonnet is a really good LLM, and you can build great things with it. However, if you're using this for serious work, IMO you probably want to use the most productive tools available.

Opus 4.1 was, to be real, punishingly expensive. It made me sweat. Thank goodness that Opus 4.5 is somehow both much better and much cheaper.

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Claude Code the same as Cursor agent mode? I really don't get why anyone would want to lock yourself to one LLM creator in the former vs having all the LLMs in the latter. How do you stop yourself from bursting through the quota with Opus? That's my biggest worry and it keeps me from using it over Sonnet in my Cursor.

Honestly, it depends on what you mean by "the same as". Both are (in my case, at least) running Opus 4.5 instances. After that, it's like using a CNC or a shop full of hand tools. They are both great, and people who know one often know both. The process is wildly different, however. Not busting my quota is simply not my top priority. I'm on their $200/month plan and I have it locked to a $1000/month overage limit, th…

What do you see as the difference between Claude Code and Cursor agent mode, since you said Claude Code doesn't work for your type of project so I'm curious why that is.

Edit, I see you answered this in another response, thanks.

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

#87
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> His language is LLM prompts. If he can check them into git and get reasonably consistent results if he ran the prompts multiple times

You're joking, right? There's nothing "reasonably consistent" about LLMs. You can input the same prompt with the same context, and get wildly different results every time. This is from a single prompt. The idea that you can get anything close to consistent results across a sequence of prompts is delusional.

You can try prompt "hacks" like STRONGLY EMPHASIZING correct behaviour (or threaten to murder kittens like in the old days), but the tool will eventually disregard an instruction, and then "apologize" profusely for it.

Comparing this to what a compiler does is absurd.[1]

Sometimes it feels like users of these tools are in entirely separate universes given the wildly different perspectives we have.

[1]: Spare me the examples of obscure compiler inconsistencies. These are leagues apart in every possible way.

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

#88
post #41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have a legacy code-base in mind? I'd happily demonstrate this kind of workflow on my day job if not for company trade-secrets. That's as legacy as it gets, 20+ year old code base with several "strata" of different technologies and approaches. Claude Opus handily navigates around it, and produces working bug fixes with minimal guidance. I'm not going to claim it's 20x or 50x yet, there's still navigation and ba…

I don't know. There's lots of options. At the extreme ends it would be interesting to see these agents work on something like boost, or metamath/set.mm, to choose deliberately obtuse candidates. Perhaps a web browser.

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

#89
post #30
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

With proper management of windows and screen real-estate as well as minimizing or even eliminating mouse usage I can hypothesize a 5000x speedup due to your greater ability to orchestrate and coordinate agents at scale.
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