> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change.
Lifting 10x my maximum PR on dead-lift goes from 160kg to 1.6T.
A means of transportation 10x faster is arriving in 9 minute what it took 1.5h
Avg. vertical jump for an male adult is 45cm. 4.5m if you 10x it.
The 10x income is the only comparison that makes sense. In Nassim Taleb’s words, this is the only Extremistan metric, obeying power laws, “Bill Gates walks into a bar”-style. The others are Mediocristan metrics - obeying Gaussians, exceedingly rare to get even slightly above the highest/lowest ever seen.
With that lens, being _effective_ (knowing the right thing to produce) can definitely 100x your value output with AI, no matter how _efficient_ (quantity per hour worked) you can become.
Amdahl can be applied directly to sequential tasks in projects.
In project management the overall gains can be even smaller than that. If the task is not on the critical path (ref a GANTT chart), then speeding it up does nothing to overall completion time.
Of course the particular resource can still be freed earlier. Which might make it possible to do other things with it. But nothing on overall completion time.
If one underestimates the swtiching costs of changing the task a resource has, one can end up with negative effects on the original project.
Ozim law - you can speed up your development 100x or 1000x and it doesn’t matter because your users are not able to absorb and understand the changes at that rate.
I was already working on teams where we got push back on too many changes so we had to scale back to monthly releases.
Modyfying database structure so fast? Good luck having useful insights when you mutate data so quick.
Maybe I am not smart enough having not smart enough customers but to judge if something meaningful is an improvement you need at least 3 months of data for a lot of things.
Maybe 100x is a massive stretch for people who are already developers but for non-coders like me the difference is almost infinite because I went from not being able to code at all to now having something that can work. 0 to infinity essentially.
> I think 10x is crazy, altho in some cases it might be attainable. 100x is just a figure of speech. It’s just not possible.
Pretty fair - I think anyone who has developed the sensation of becoming their own bottleneck understands this. And yes, if you can simply be twice as productive as you were prior to LLMs, then that is an improvement. What I worry about is that that multiplier will become a criteria for staying employed. I.e. if you were a 1x developer, and now you're a 2x, why would a company keep you in position knowing they could instead hire someone who's 5x, 10x, 100x, etc. They might feel like they are losing out. This is all relative.
One thing I never understood about the "Nx Engineer" trope is if it's supposed to mean "one team member who achieves as much as N average team members", "one solo dev who achieves as much as an average N-person team", or "one solo dev who achieves as much as N average solo devs". Those seem like wildly different scales, and it seems like everyone who talks about it means something different.
Imagine a gaussian distribution of all engineers. It's a figure of speech to say someone's productivity falls in the right-side tail of that distribution.
The multiplier isn't meant literally. It's shorthand to say someone is exceptionally good in a way that is rare to find.
Every place has had some experience with some problem that entire different teams, with dozens or even small hundreds of people failed to solve for years and years, and then some individual came and did it.
And almost everybody has seen or heard some similar story.
The thing is, those stories don't have a lot of similarity to each other, and there isn't much you can conclude for anybody's competence without looking at all the details. But they happen all the time, and not only in software development (just not on the same frequency, for obvious reasons).
"One solo dev who achieves as much as a N-person team" or alternatively, "N developers who achieve as much as a 10*N person team" is the one most easily supported with evidence. Prior to their acquisition, WhatsApp had 55 employees of which 32 were engineers. Facebook Messenger had a team that was most likely 100x larger than that and could not displace them in the target markets. In 1995 when Microsoft effectively defeated IBM as the premier software company, Microsoft had just 17,000 employees to IBMs 225,000 employees. The entire reason why a startup can even succeed is because a smaller, skilled team can overcome a much larger team with much more resources.
Microsoft headcount vs. IBM is not a valid comparison. IBM is also a hardware company. IBM is also a service company. And IBM (at least at that time) did far more custom development than Microsoft. You'd have to compare the headcount of Microsoft's OS business to IBM's OS business (or OS development organization, if it wasn't a separate business).
Nowadays a single solo dev can outright achieve as much as entire _organizations_ could in the early 2010s. I know multiple people whos raw code output easily exceeds say everything Amazon/Google/Facebook (likely combined) could do in a single year in the 2010s.
The original definition was difference between the best and the worst performers in a organization. Not the best and the average. It was also in the context of specific tasks.
Before AI 10x was this mythical thing people talked about… except that it wasn’t rare. There were 10x beginners. There were experienced 10xers who lied about it because they didn’t want to get stuck doing other people’s work.
In the corporate world how do you become a 10x developer without AI? Simple, don’t repeat the same stupid shit everyone else does and write your own tools. That’s it. It’s simple because software only serves one purpose: automation. If people aren’t thinking in terms of labor elimination it’s so easy to be 10x whatever it is they do.
But, in all fairness most developers in the corporate world, at least on the web side, are barely capable of programming. They rely on open source packages and large frameworks to do almost everything. If you want to be 10x that then just don’t do that. Being a good programmer is helpful but not required. More important than competence or skill is not being cowardly about writing original code.
My company has a huge problem where a junior engineer will complete tasks very quickly and appear to be extremely productive, but they're just hiding tech debt that has to be cleaned up later. That clean-up doesn't get factored into any assessment of the original developer's productivity. Fixing the system once it's been working and has live data takes a lot longer than it would have taken to build it right the first time.
For example: storing an API key in a plain text JSON preferences object that many different parts of the system read and return to users. Determining if there was a breach, figuring out who to talk to at the third-party company to get the key rotated, etc takes time. The person doing that work doesn't look very productive because they aren't shipping a lot of code that impacts customers. The developer who put the API in plain text looks like a 10x engineer because they shipped a customer-facing feature really quickly.
> Are you feeling down because AI is everywhere around you and you’re supposed to be working at 10x, 50x or 100x? Is this causing you anxiety? Please relax and take it easy. If you’re doing 2x as a team, it’s great already!
Actually, the most depressing part is that programming languages don't matter as before, the fun on open source projects is gone, and 2x as a team, means management now can do the same with 1/2 of the previous team sizes, most think they always land on the lucky half.
> I bet they are measuring lines of code, MRs or deployments.
My previous employ was at one point being courted by an AI coding agent company to push their agent on us, internally; after a trial period, they sent us pretty graphs show us the "increase in productivity", which as TFA correctly guesses, was MRs.
I double checked the numbers, and … the books were cooked. This was pointed out and "oh it was some bug in the script we use that's all fixed now" but of course, … the graphs weren't regenerated or corrected. (And also, of course, the correction would not have been in their favor.) So of course the (now known to be bad) data continued to be an input into decision making. (Which TBF to AI, making decisions on suddenly conjured data before or even after it has been verified has been a thing long before AI.)
A 20x employee is not making 80% less than a median 20x employee anywhere else. At that echelon the pay differences based on location, if they exist at all, are insignificant compared to base.
My sources say programmers at the time could punch 100-200 lines of holes or 6-24,000 individual holes per hour.
The back of my napkin suggests that punching 60 to 240 billion holes per hour (~16.7M-66.7M per second)results in incineration of the media leading to a net 0X in production of useable code.
AI can outright make Skyrim/earlier Call of Duties or Battlefields in minutes. Literally. From scratch. Keep in mind that Bethesda sank, what, hundreds of millions into Skyrim?
AI can only make Skyrim in minutes when it is given Skyrim to copy.
If you wanted to make it from scratch it would take a 1000 page design document that would probably take you years to write, and the result would be slop anyway.
If "AI" can make Skyrim in minutes, why is all of the slop...slop?
Do you have any citation for any AI actually making (not recompiling or creating an emulator for) a game of that size and polish in any timeframe? Let alone minutes?
> Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours.
Re: 100x productivity that's still not technically correct (the best form of correct), is it? 3 hours is 180 minutes. Agent would have to get it done in 1.8 minutes.
In case some contrarian climbs out of the woodwork to yell "umm aktually it's just a metaphor! nobody would actually think that", let me introduce you to Garry Tan and his 100x AI dev [0].
| Task type | Human team | AI-assisted | Compression |
|-----------------------------|-----------|-------------|-------------|
| Boilerplate / scaffolding | 2 days | 15 min | ~100x |
| Test writing | 1 day | 15 min | ~50x |
| Feature implementation | 1 week | 30 min | ~30x |
| Bug fix + regression test | 4 hours | 15 min | ~20x |
| Architecture / design | 2 days | 4 hours | ~5x |
| Research / exploration | 1 day | 3 hours | ~3x |
For me personally? Local processing power. The reason I rolled my own harness environment is because my 16 core CPU was literally MAXED OUT with parallel compilation units and edit streams. A custom harness barely helped. Just allows me to run a few more sessions in parallel
Yeah, when AI bros talk about 10x or 100x developers, they're always talking about the input metrics (how many CRs, how many tickets, etc.), but never about the output metrics (revenue or profit growth, customer acquisition, cost savings, etc.).
I don't think there's a single claim of increased productivity thanks to AI that I've seen that held under scrutiny. It's all smoke and mirrors.
On a side note, this sentence is extremely funny to me: "Super small or specific task. Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours". Even when the author tries to make the case for AI, he's only able to reach a 18x multiplier, far from the 100x boasted by people.
This is a point that I think folks miss a lot in these discussions.
I've seen my own raw code output increase by more that 100%, and that's after human review to make sure it's not just slop, before sending it to the rest of the team for review. And we're all doing that. We're all shipping way more code than ever before.
But I don't think our number of users is changing dramatically at all. "Engagement" (or however else you want to measure usage) isn't something that's gone up by the same factor.
\<half baked thought>
I think the simple explanation is this: there is finite "attention". Digital products cost nothing[^1] to copy and ship. They can scale to your maximum amount of users with the same cost to write. And now that cost to write is →0.
But attention hasn't increased by the same factor. People still spend exactly the same amount of time in front of their PCs. Orders of magnitudes of additional features aren't going to actually result in orders of magnitudes more usage.
Maybe there's some hypothetical product that could gain such an advantage in the market that it would fully displace all other entrenched players. Maybe a new application category might come to exist (agentic engineering applications come to mind).
But us being 10x faster at building out features doesn't mean there's suddenly 10x more supply. That's the smoke and mirrors of it all. What does being 10x faster actually get you?
<even less baked>
The logical outcome would be to spend 90% less on the cost center (engineering), to retain the same productivity, right? That's a accounting view of the world, one that can't account for the institutional capital that's built from human collaboration, and redundancy from having more maintainers of a project. But that seems like the only way this ends up working. Trading 10 engineering payrolls for 1 engineer and (<9 engineering payrolls) worth of tokens.
[^1]: perfectly spherical vacuum approximation, of course
> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change. Lifting 10x my maximum PR on dead-lift goes from 160kg to 1.6T. A means of transportation 10x faster is arriving in 9 minute what it took 1.5h Avg. vertical jump for an male adult is 45cm. 4.5m if you 10x it.
The 10x income is the only comparison that makes sense. In Nassim Taleb’s words, this is the only Extremistan metric, obeying power laws, “Bill Gates walks into a bar”-style. The others are Mediocristan metrics - obeying Gaussians, exceedingly rare to get even slightly above the highest/lowest ever seen.
With that lens, being _effective_ (knowing the right thing to produce) can definitely 100x your value output with AI, no matter how _efficient_ (quantity per hour worked) you can become.
There must be an equivalent of Amdahl's law for AI-assisted development.
"You can get 100x speedup on the 90% of your development tasks, but remaining 90% of them take the same amount of time with or without AI"
Amdahl can be applied directly to sequential tasks in projects.
In project management the overall gains can be even smaller than that. If the task is not on the critical path (ref a GANTT chart), then speeding it up does nothing to overall completion time.
Of course the particular resource can still be freed earlier. Which might make it possible to do other things with it. But nothing on overall completion time.
If one underestimates the swtiching costs of changing the task a resource has, one can end up with negative effects on the original project.
Ozim law - you can speed up your development 100x or 1000x and it doesn’t matter because your users are not able to absorb and understand the changes at that rate.
I was already working on teams where we got push back on too many changes so we had to scale back to monthly releases.
Modyfying database structure so fast? Good luck having useful insights when you mutate data so quick.
Maybe I am not smart enough having not smart enough customers but to judge if something meaningful is an improvement you need at least 3 months of data for a lot of things.
Maybe 100x is a massive stretch for people who are already developers but for non-coders like me the difference is almost infinite because I went from not being able to code at all to now having something that can work. 0 to infinity essentially.
Well, 0 to 1 - but that's still infinity times more than you could do before.
Well, 0 to 0.1 - that's also infinity times more, if you do the math
> I think 10x is crazy, altho in some cases it might be attainable. 100x is just a figure of speech. It’s just not possible.
Pretty fair - I think anyone who has developed the sensation of becoming their own bottleneck understands this. And yes, if you can simply be twice as productive as you were prior to LLMs, then that is an improvement. What I worry about is that that multiplier will become a criteria for staying employed. I.e. if you were a 1x developer, and now you're a 2x, why would a company keep you in position knowing they could instead hire someone who's 5x, 10x, 100x, etc. They might feel like they are losing out. This is all relative.
One thing I never understood about the "Nx Engineer" trope is if it's supposed to mean "one team member who achieves as much as N average team members", "one solo dev who achieves as much as an average N-person team", or "one solo dev who achieves as much as N average solo devs". Those seem like wildly different scales, and it seems like everyone who talks about it means something different.
Imagine a gaussian distribution of all engineers. It's a figure of speech to say someone's productivity falls in the right-side tail of that distribution.
The multiplier isn't meant literally. It's shorthand to say someone is exceptionally good in a way that is rare to find.
Every place has had some experience with some problem that entire different teams, with dozens or even small hundreds of people failed to solve for years and years, and then some individual came and did it.
And almost everybody has seen or heard some similar story.
The thing is, those stories don't have a lot of similarity to each other, and there isn't much you can conclude for anybody's competence without looking at all the details. But they happen all the time, and not only in software development (just not on the same frequency, for obvious reasons).
"One solo dev who achieves as much as a N-person team" or alternatively, "N developers who achieve as much as a 10*N person team" is the one most easily supported with evidence. Prior to their acquisition, WhatsApp had 55 employees of which 32 were engineers. Facebook Messenger had a team that was most likely 100x larger than that and could not displace them in the target markets. In 1995 when Microsoft effectively defeated IBM as the premier software company, Microsoft had just 17,000 employees to IBMs 225,000 employees. The entire reason why a startup can even succeed is because a smaller, skilled team can overcome a much larger team with much more resources.
Microsoft headcount vs. IBM is not a valid comparison. IBM is also a hardware company. IBM is also a service company. And IBM (at least at that time) did far more custom development than Microsoft. You'd have to compare the headcount of Microsoft's OS business to IBM's OS business (or OS development organization, if it wasn't a separate business).
I don't think listed options are "different scales" - they seem similarly "out of reach for normal people" just in different directions
Nowadays a single solo dev can outright achieve as much as entire _organizations_ could in the early 2010s. I know multiple people whos raw code output easily exceeds say everything Amazon/Google/Facebook (likely combined) could do in a single year in the 2010s.
> Super small or specific task.
> Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours
I think human in the loop is the only way to achieve this. I've never seen the robot reduce the complexity of a problem space.
Multiagent might seem like the obvious path to 100x but I think the exact inverse is true.
The original definition was difference between the best and the worst performers in a organization. Not the best and the average. It was also in the context of specific tasks.
[delayed]
Before AI 10x was this mythical thing people talked about… except that it wasn’t rare. There were 10x beginners. There were experienced 10xers who lied about it because they didn’t want to get stuck doing other people’s work.
In the corporate world how do you become a 10x developer without AI? Simple, don’t repeat the same stupid shit everyone else does and write your own tools. That’s it. It’s simple because software only serves one purpose: automation. If people aren’t thinking in terms of labor elimination it’s so easy to be 10x whatever it is they do.
But, in all fairness most developers in the corporate world, at least on the web side, are barely capable of programming. They rely on open source packages and large frameworks to do almost everything. If you want to be 10x that then just don’t do that. Being a good programmer is helpful but not required. More important than competence or skill is not being cowardly about writing original code.
It's impact that scales, not "productiveness"
A programming language, for example, keeps scaling in impact after the code has been written.
My company has a huge problem where a junior engineer will complete tasks very quickly and appear to be extremely productive, but they're just hiding tech debt that has to be cleaned up later. That clean-up doesn't get factored into any assessment of the original developer's productivity. Fixing the system once it's been working and has live data takes a lot longer than it would have taken to build it right the first time.
For example: storing an API key in a plain text JSON preferences object that many different parts of the system read and return to users. Determining if there was a breach, figuring out who to talk to at the third-party company to get the key rotated, etc takes time. The person doing that work doesn't look very productive because they aren't shipping a lot of code that impacts customers. The developer who put the API in plain text looks like a 10x engineer because they shipped a customer-facing feature really quickly.
Okay we are not fucking starting this shit again. Have we learned nothing?
We have very short attention spans and even shorter working memory. Also, the big numbers trigger our fomo very easily.
I just wrote a program that writes code at ~200mb/s and so will create a codebase the size of the mainline Ubuntu in minutes.
Never mind that it's just sedding "print "Hello, World!"" to the penultimate line.
I may not be too bright, but Lines of Code? I've got those.
> Are you feeling down because AI is everywhere around you and you’re supposed to be working at 10x, 50x or 100x? Is this causing you anxiety? Please relax and take it easy. If you’re doing 2x as a team, it’s great already!
Actually, the most depressing part is that programming languages don't matter as before, the fun on open source projects is gone, and 2x as a team, means management now can do the same with 1/2 of the previous team sizes, most think they always land on the lucky half.
> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change.
No matter how much I earn my lifestyle stays the same. Rejecting lifestyle inflation has been the single best thing I've done in my life.
Speaking of salary though, I bet if I become this mythical 100x AI powered developer I won't see even a 2x salary increase.
Productivity never translates to wages.
> I bet they are measuring lines of code, MRs or deployments.
My previous employ was at one point being courted by an AI coding agent company to push their agent on us, internally; after a trial period, they sent us pretty graphs show us the "increase in productivity", which as TFA correctly guesses, was MRs.
I double checked the numbers, and … the books were cooked. This was pointed out and "oh it was some bug in the script we use that's all fixed now" but of course, … the graphs weren't regenerated or corrected. (And also, of course, the correction would not have been in their favor.) So of course the (now known to be bad) data continued to be an input into decision making. (Which TBF to AI, making decisions on suddenly conjured data before or even after it has been verified has been a thing long before AI.)
100x employees are real, they look like a 20x employee in a market where comp is 20% of a major US city
A 20x employee is not making 80% less than a median 20x employee anywhere else. At that echelon the pay differences based on location, if they exist at all, are insignificant compared to base.
Even before ai I've seen 0.1x programmers. If 10x programmers exists and we normalize 0.1x programmers to 1x, then 10x became 100x.
A 0.1x developer becomes 0.01x with AI, not 1x.
> 10x a salary of $70.000/year (~avg salary in USA) is 700k€/year. Imagine the lifestyle change
No, no it isn't.
"only" ~€631,113.70
Also, an average SWE salary in the US must be way higher than $70k.
In a word, yes.
BLS doesn't make sharing links easy so here's a screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/irwwwb.png
we measure productivity compared to 1960s-era punch card programming, obviously. I'm a 10000000x developer
My sources say programmers at the time could punch 100-200 lines of holes or 6-24,000 individual holes per hour.
The back of my napkin suggests that punching 60 to 240 billion holes per hour (~16.7M-66.7M per second)results in incineration of the media leading to a net 0X in production of useable code.
E.T. (the worst game in history) was done in 5 weeks. Experienced game developer can make similar game in hour. AI in minutes.
AI can outright make Skyrim/earlier Call of Duties or Battlefields in minutes. Literally. From scratch. Keep in mind that Bethesda sank, what, hundreds of millions into Skyrim?
AI can only make Skyrim in minutes when it is given Skyrim to copy. If you wanted to make it from scratch it would take a 1000 page design document that would probably take you years to write, and the result would be slop anyway.
If "AI" can make Skyrim in minutes, why is all of the slop...slop?
Do you have any citation for any AI actually making (not recompiling or creating an emulator for) a game of that size and polish in any timeframe? Let alone minutes?
> Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours.
Re: 100x productivity that's still not technically correct (the best form of correct), is it? 3 hours is 180 minutes. Agent would have to get it done in 1.8 minutes.
In case some contrarian climbs out of the woodwork to yell "umm aktually it's just a metaphor! nobody would actually think that", let me introduce you to Garry Tan and his 100x AI dev [0].
[0] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/ETHOS.mdWhat is this curious scaling obstacle that is preventing them from going to 1000x+?
For me personally? Local processing power. The reason I rolled my own harness environment is because my 16 core CPU was literally MAXED OUT with parallel compilation units and edit streams. A custom harness barely helped. Just allows me to run a few more sessions in parallel
Should not spending more money on local processing power be a non-brainer then? You will make it all back and then some?
Reading speed, working memory. Agents are good coders, they are not good middle managers.
Does the 100x refer to the boredom of these developers?
Yeah, when AI bros talk about 10x or 100x developers, they're always talking about the input metrics (how many CRs, how many tickets, etc.), but never about the output metrics (revenue or profit growth, customer acquisition, cost savings, etc.).
I don't think there's a single claim of increased productivity thanks to AI that I've seen that held under scrutiny. It's all smoke and mirrors.
On a side note, this sentence is extremely funny to me: "Super small or specific task. Tasks so small that AI can do them in 10 minutes, were you would take almost 3 hours". Even when the author tries to make the case for AI, he's only able to reach a 18x multiplier, far from the 100x boasted by people.
This is a point that I think folks miss a lot in these discussions.
I've seen my own raw code output increase by more that 100%, and that's after human review to make sure it's not just slop, before sending it to the rest of the team for review. And we're all doing that. We're all shipping way more code than ever before.
But I don't think our number of users is changing dramatically at all. "Engagement" (or however else you want to measure usage) isn't something that's gone up by the same factor.
\<half baked thought>
I think the simple explanation is this: there is finite "attention". Digital products cost nothing[^1] to copy and ship. They can scale to your maximum amount of users with the same cost to write. And now that cost to write is →0.
But attention hasn't increased by the same factor. People still spend exactly the same amount of time in front of their PCs. Orders of magnitudes of additional features aren't going to actually result in orders of magnitudes more usage.
Maybe there's some hypothetical product that could gain such an advantage in the market that it would fully displace all other entrenched players. Maybe a new application category might come to exist (agentic engineering applications come to mind).
But us being 10x faster at building out features doesn't mean there's suddenly 10x more supply. That's the smoke and mirrors of it all. What does being 10x faster actually get you?
<even less baked>
The logical outcome would be to spend 90% less on the cost center (engineering), to retain the same productivity, right? That's a accounting view of the world, one that can't account for the institutional capital that's built from human collaboration, and redundancy from having more maintainers of a project. But that seems like the only way this ends up working. Trading 10 engineering payrolls for 1 engineer and (<9 engineering payrolls) worth of tokens.
[^1]: perfectly spherical vacuum approximation, of course
So someone who went from producing ~30k loc/year to 30 million hasn't increased their productivity?
I've seen ai rewrite a 25,000 line project as a 70,000 line project with no change in functionality, so theres that.
No? What are those 30M lines of code doing? For all we know they might have massively decreased their and their team's productivity.