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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

#71

Post by judahmeek »

peteforde wrote: post #55

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?

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

#72

Post by chrisandchris »

gdulli wrote: post #47

Maybe a good difference between "senior" at ten years and senior at twenty years is whether you think amount of code produced is a positive metric or a negative one.

As I get older (more experienced) I really write less code, but more of the code I write is correct. Am I doing something wrong?

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

#74

Post by stefanfisk »

EGreg wrote: post #35
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

That code has a lot of smell IMHO :/

What's the rationale behind writing PHP as if it was JS? Unless I am mistaken it's like someone just did a transliteration from JS to PHP without even converting the JSDoc to PHPDoc.

And are there any tests for the code?

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

#75

Post by satvikpendem »

chrisandchris wrote: post #72
gdulli wrote: post #47

Maybe a good difference between "senior" at ten years and senior at twenty years is whether you think amount of code produced is a positive metric or a negative one.

As I get older (more experienced) I really write less code, but more of the code I write is correct. Am I doing something wrong?

No, you are doing it exactly right. Code is a liability not an asset, hence, technical debt.

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

#76

Post by Tade0 »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #52

In other words, in a single year you did the amount of work that would take 20-50 years of a regular software engineer to complete? So, it would take roughly two months to complete a project at the scale of SQLite or TeX.

Makes me wonder what Terry A. Davis would have to say about AI if he was alive today.

I imagine he would have a few choice words of the usual sort, but would he recognise that seemingly anyone can write their own OS like he did?

Personally I'm sceptical because few people can even fit a high-level overview of such a project in their heads, much less the entire codebase.

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

#77

Post by satvikpendem »

peteforde wrote: post #55

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.

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

#78

Post by jononor »

EGreg wrote: post #35
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

Why not merged to main? What is the definition of done being applied here?

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

#79

Post by gdulli »

chrisandchris wrote: post #72
gdulli wrote: post #47

Maybe a good difference between "senior" at ten years and senior at twenty years is whether you think amount of code produced is a positive metric or a negative one.

As I get older (more experienced) I really write less code, but more of the code I write is correct. Am I doing something wrong?

No, that sounds right. First you don't know how to write something, then you know one way, then you know multiple ways, then later you know multiple ways and have the instinct to pick the best one first.
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