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2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

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Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#51

Post by ericol »

I'm not sure about the x, but the first thing that arises from that is, I feel like in my case it's way higher than 2.

The 2nd thing is, how do I measure that.

---

In my case, the details of my work (Kinda DevOps, kinda Senior Dev) makes it that having an LLM to do the heavy lifting allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.

An example of the effect of LLMs in my daily work is that I'm in the middle of a PHP upgrade for a rather large legacy application, and the "heavy lifting" is really out of the scale, letting me concentrate on what really matters, while at the same time if I do keep "the harness" tight I'm certain the results are the correct ones. Also correcting course is just as cheap.

Not having to worry on the tooling on exchange has the incredible desirable result of my velocity being incomparable to what it was before.

Then we have the side effect of how easy to do transfer knowledge: Rather than telling the QA guy how to do the work specific for this task, I defined a set of files (.md documents, skills, an off-the-shelf customised MCP server) that assist QA into doing the work in a way that helps me do my job better and faster.

There's also a clear possibility that what I'm doing will expand to the rest of the team I am in, completely altering the way in which we approach development.

If we take 'x' as 'mileage', yours might vary. Mine has, and I'm baffled at the positive net results I AM getting.

Also, this what I do (coding?) is extremely fun again.

Being able to work close to the speed of thought is the best high.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#52

Post by Hupriene »

monknomo wrote: post #24
openasocket wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+10, I can't stand AI-generated comments. Half the time they are paragraph-length translations of every 5 lines of code into English prose, or just regurgitating whatever prompt they were given. When they actually try making high level comments they are worse than useless. It's really hard to put into words exactly why. It's something about how they are very verbose, but at the same time vague and stated in a slightl…

locally correct and globally incoherent is how they seem to me. I, and a number of folks I have talked to, find some of them incomprehensible. Like each sentence makes sense, but the overall thing does not.

I kind of wander if the comments are intentionally bad, providing programmers something to bike shed about. A sneakier approach to the flattery the models used to so use so heavily.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#53

Post by t-writescode »

whateveracct wrote: post #7
gashad wrote: post #5

This reminds me of themes I recently saw in [Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5GBkD555M ) (Warning: the last 3 slides seem like an advertisement). One thing I liked is how Dex has a little graphic he glossed over showing software development is - 25% planning & aligning with other teams - 25% coding - 25% testing/verifying - 25% code review/rework One…

> So maybe there's 2x speedup in coding. But that's only a small speedup in the totality of everything software engineers do. Amdahl's Law should be familiar to anyone with a 4y computer science/engineering degree. Why aren't they applying it to their own throughput?

Well, there’s probably several reasons:

  1) because they’re not doing those others spheres of work
  2) because they don’t think about the work
     nor how tired they are afterwards
  3) they’re proselytizing AI work as the future and
     that conflicts with that vision
  4) the other shoe hasn’t dropped
  5) they really don’t see it
  6) some people genuinely hate programming and this
     helps them skip that.
I’m sure others as well.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#54

Post by soperj »

ericol wrote: post #51

I'm not sure about the x, but the first thing that arises from that is, I feel like in my case it's way higher than 2. The 2nd thing is, how do I measure that. --- In my case, the details of my work (Kinda DevOps, kinda Senior Dev) makes it that having an LLM to do the heavy lifting allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on. An example of the effect of LLMs in m…

> allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.

How would you know it's better when you have no expertise?

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#55

Post by pantelisk »

While I agree with the premise, I think this angle only applies on work one was going to do no matter what. The real power of these tools is that there are so many ideas people would like to try, but never have the time or motivation to pursue.

So the comparison is not only "built with and without LLM" but "would you even build this if you didn't have the LLM?". The gap in productivity in this case is much more wide.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#56

Post by localhoster »

When I approach a new area or task I first explore it, by hand, and implement, by hand, the task. This way, I get a deeper understanding and it gives me some momentum to llm the rest of the related tasks. Till I loose enough grip to "re-dive in" that area and to again, do stuff my hand. Some tasks, I only do by hand, and some tasks, I only use llm for.

Really depends on the task, my the project and on, and honesty, my instrest and availability at the moment.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#57

Post by leleat »

dev_hugepages wrote: post #29
lazopm wrote: post #16

The way I see it you should calibrate the way you work with LLMs based on how confident you are on that specific area, and if it's your responsibility to own/understand it. Here's how it feels for me: * Learning stage: 0.5x - 1x. I change my system prompt to teacher mode, taking the productivity hit for actually learning the system/tool pays off dividends later. I change my system prompt to "teacher mode" and slowly…

Hey, could you share the prompt you're using for "teacher mode"?

Someone posted their AGENTS.md some time ago, that is used in practice to teach their students[1]. That might be useful to you in this context as well.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359858

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#58

Post by petesergeant »

esafak wrote: post #23

This is a dated take to me. I think the next stage in unlocking productivity is so called "loop engineering"; figuring out how to effectively not read all the code while ensuring quality. To me that means implementing statistical quality control and formal methods. Before I get there I have to figure out how to reliably audit plan adherence. The problem is that when the specs are in natural language, as they are, you…

This will be a deeply unpopular opinion, but I have an 80k line Go project I've created where I haven't read the source, but would absolutely stake its quality against most hand-written projects of a similar size[0].

Recent LLMs struggle with the author's stated issues only inline: they're entirely capable of going back and evaluating codebases to find architectural issues and LLM slop signatures, especially when you use other models to check one model's output. This wasn't true until Fable-class models, but it's true now.

0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#59

Post by wongarsu »

prmoustache wrote: post #30
what_hn wrote: post #3

Does a 60x speedup count? Are you still copying and pasting from chatgpt, because if so your definitely doing it wrong.

If 60x was a thing, we would see many fantastic products appearing on the market, every product would have improved or goten major new interesting features. Yet it hasn't really happened.

I believe I have seen 60x improvements on certain classes of bugs. Just not on development as a whole

And I've also seen the other side, where vibe coding on projects that had bad code quality to start with leads to bug riddled messes. Projects with beautiful and elaborate test harnesses, that break seconds after contact with a real human user

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#60

Post by jryan49 »

All these hot takes that LLMs are -10x, 100x, 2x are kind of silly. It really depends on:

What you are using it for? What language, what framework, how many LOC, what domain, how much docs can the LLM read, etc etc.

What are you optimizing for? Cost? Human knowing how your code works? Getting something out the door?

How Good You Are at Prompting the LLM for THAT specific set of parameters?

I find AI can save me like 5x time on something, and in other cases it's wasted 5x time. Overtime I'm hopefully learning how to use it better.

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