Every engineer believes they are a 10X engineer. What makes thinking you're a 100X engineer with AI any different? Or any more accurate?

Recall the study done with open source devs, every one of them believed they were more productive with AI than without, yet the net effect of AI resulted in a 19% loss in productivity.

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tracerbulletx a day ago | parent | next [-]

Im going to be annoying and show you a free open source vibe coded project to make a point. The viewer part of this project predates AI, it took me years just to get the viewer to be great. I built this Video compositor in 2 days that does beat matching, keyframe animation, parameter automation, shader effect layers, masking with SegmentAnything, auto looping and a ton of other things I need when im video editing, cancelled my after effects account and doing this is something I do professionally. There is absolutely 0 chance of a single person doing that in a month, let alone 2 days, before Opus level models. Its not really cloned from anything other than my experiences doing video editing.

https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/

	▲	latentsea 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with this sentiment, though it's a slightly odd future. I've been running custom forks of various open source software that I just customise through pure vibe coding testing it into a working solution for some custom thing I want to do. But it seems inefficient everyone doing that.

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lilbigdoot 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This has been the thing that bugs me. I use LLMs a lot for everything except code that ends up on something I publish, I just keep getting burned enough when I try I stopped. Then people are talking about these 10x gains while the only research we have shows a negative effect.

I don't doubt people are 10x for certain things or things that used to be a ton of plumbing for the smallest stuff, but I'm easily 2-3x faster than I used to be because the rest of the process is so much faster now (finding information, libraries, getting answers to odd questions, builds, BUILDS). But I'm not seeing the software I use or posted here really change or zoom off like people say they are..

	▲	bunderbunder 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s selection bias. It’s always been selection bias. The “10x” developers I’ve known (and been) were all incredibly effective at snagging the work that they personally were most able to do quickly, and shirking the rest. That’s not necessarily all the difference. But I’d estimate they would maybe be at most 2x developers if you remove their ability to avoid the proverbial 10% of the work that takes 90% of the effort. AI coding intensifies this effect. And it also helps explain why people’s amazing success stories for personal projects don’t seem to translate to business ROI. For a side project I am in complete control over design and scope, have no customers or stakeholders to keep happy, etc. So I easily - and mostly unconsciously - tailor what I’m doing to what the coding agent can do well, and quietly drop the rest. I don’t have that luxury at work.

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hobo123 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think I notice when I'm obviously making 10x progress of other devs in a project. I also notice when other devs are coding circles around me in another project.

Ok, maybe some people are incapable of reflection.