10x is definitely possible at a startup level. I suppose not in a big tech world (seems obvious to me, and it's not like development speed was the bottleneck there either, right?)

You can choose not to believe what I say (and I genuinely understand if you do), and I can simply keep on doing it. I'm not taking it out of thin air either. tuesday I did in 8h the work I scheduled for roughly 65h. Ok, so maybe it's not 10x, maybe it's 8x, same ball park.

And that's only talking about development. If I now get into other aspects....I have just spent the last 1.5 hours creating an incredibly detailed backcatalog of tasks and epics. This is the most detailed I have ever done so in my life and it has been working very well. It's like we merged the good of highly-detailed waterfall with the speed of agile.

Tee-hee: Watergile. (I'm sure some expert in the field will let me know I have coined a new term for something that very much has a name; excuse my ignorance in advance).

Nonetheless, I did this all by talking to the computer which is interfacing with my project management tools, the project documentation, and the project code. Full context on everything. In the past, I would have taken 3 or 4 days to create the same amount of tasks with a vaguely similar amount of detail. But, in truth, I wouldn't have spent so much time putting this love into the craft (!!) of planning a project, because it would exhaust me and feel like a waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I totally see shit code being thrown everywhere by inferior AI models or people who can't tame the beasts, but the right people in my life are _clearly_ building out more, better tested code, and actually built with more care. Maybe it's not at the line-by-line level, but it certainly is from the end-product result (thinking of the actual end-user). I accept your mileage may vary -- this is my very personal experience.

Maybe it'll stop happening, who knows. Maybe price will be prohibitive, or maybe we'll have such an avalanche of ideas that weren't worth building that everyone will be overwhelmed and take a step back. Or maybe we won't develop juniors into the seniors of tomorrow. Or maybe everything will indeed implode once products are large enough that the original development speed can't be maintained anymore and expectations are mismatched.

What I do know is that it is definitely happening in my world, and I haven't had this much fun since I was a little kid learning to code.

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the__alchemist 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you have testable hypothesis for how the 10x will manifest? I.e., is there a way we could (coarsely) measure this in a year or two from now?

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jorl17 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's a very good question. Some metrics I'm watching or considering watching right now:

- Amount of leads we're taking in (per unit of time)

- Sprint velocity changes (task complexity should stay roughly the same with AI, and team velocity increase — we've been seeing this happening)

- Hire rates (more sales people, less developers?)

- Number of projects per unit of time (of similar dimension, hard to measure)

- Length of "bugfixing buffer" before big releases (we've actually been noticing this go down)

- Another way of saying it is: number of bugs, or bugs per feature

- Drift between planned execution time and actual execution time (we've been delivering early...but I guess we'll soon adjust our estimates...or maybe not, who knows?)

- Spend on AI models

- I can't measure this, but I can sort of "feel it": but the overall feedback we get from clients, the feeling we get from them.

- Number of tests (tests have skyrocketed. Can't be sure about the quality, but, hey, it's a metric)

- Feature turnaround time (how long since "feature is proposed" until it's actually implemented)

- documentation to code ratio (not sure what we'll make of it, but there's a somewhat worrying trend here)

- team balance: is everyone slowly becoming fullstack? Do we feel that those who aren't are significantly affecting development speed? if so, that indicates that the other ones are somehow moving faster

I can't really think of any others, but I'm sure they exist.

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AnimalMuppet 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The future will not be evenly distributed. You can't expect to see it in the productivity of the industry as a whole, or even the productivity of a large company. You might be able to see it in a medium-sized team if you measure carefully.

	▲	jorl17 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that big corps will build faster (or more) -- in fact I said I don't expect them to right now, and I'm not so sure that will change. What I believe is that early prototype development and pivoting is insanely fast now. And if you find excellent engineers who are also great product people, and then pair them with people who have truly great ideas, many wonderful new products will emerge.
	▲	the__alchemist 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So, it sounds like measuring directly in individual individuals or companies might be tough. (Unless the company is medium-sized?) Maybe we could look for broader trends in the economy and beyond. What sorts of companies will this manifest in? I.e. mostly "tech" companies, or beyond?