Earlier quoted context omitted.
Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.
What tasks is it doing 50% of the work on for you?
Random Postgres stuff:
- Showed a couple of Geo/PostGIS queries that were taking up more CPU according to our metrics, asked it to make it faster, it rewrote it in away that it actually used the index. (using the operator for example for proximity). One-shotted. Whole effort was about 5 mins.
- Regularly asking for maintenance scripts (like give me a script that shows me the most fragmented tables, or highest storage, etc).
CSS:
Built a whole horizontal logo marquee with CSS animations, I didn't write a single line, then I asked for little things like "have the people's avatars gently pulsate" – all this was done in about 15 mins. I would've normally spent 8-16 hours on all that pixel pushing.
Elixir App:
- I asked it to look at my GitHub actions file and make it go faster. In about 2-3 iterations, it cut my build time from 6 minutes to 2 minutes. The effort was about an hour (most of it spent waiting for builds, or fiddling with some weird syntax errors or just combining a couple extra steps, but I didn't have to spend a second doing all the research, its suggestions were spot on)
- In our repo (900 files) we had created an umbrella app (a certain kind of elixir app). I wanted to make it a non-umbrella. This one did require more work and me pushing it, but I've been putting off this task for 3 YEARS since it just didn't feel like a priority to spend 2-3 days on. I got it done in about 2 hours.
- Built a whole discussion board in about 6 hours.
- There are probably 3-6 tickets per week where I just say "implement FND-234", and it one-shots a bugfix, or implementation, especially if it's a well defined smaller ticket. For example, make this list sortable. (it knows to reuse my sortablejs hook and look at how we implemented it elsewhere).
- With the Appsignal MCP, I've had it summarize the top 5 errors in production, and write a bug fix for one I picked (I only did this once, the MCP is new). That one was one-shotted.
- Rust library (It's just an elixir binding to a rust library, the actual rust is like 20 lines, so not at all complex)... I've never coded a day of rust in my life, but all my cargo updates and occasional syntax/API deprecations, I have claude do my upgrades and fixes. I still don't know how to write any Rust.
NextJS App:
- I haven't fixed a single typescript error in probably 5 months now, I can't be bothered, CC gets it right about 99% of the time.
- Pasted in a Figma file and asked it to implement. This rarely is one-shotted. But it's still about 10x faster than me developing it manually.
The best combination is if you have a robust component library and well documented patterns. Then stuff goes even faster.
All on the $100 plan in which I've hit the limit only twice in two months. I think if they raised the price to $500, it would still feel like a no-brainer.
I think Anthropic knows this. My guess is that they're going to get us hooked on the productivity gains, and we will happily pay 5x more if they raised the prices, since the gains are that big.