Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.
If people are realistically a baseline of 10x more productive where are all the features, games, applications, SAAS’s that are suddenly possible that weren’t before?
They're out there. I've noticed a surge of Show HNs right here. A lot of it is vibe coded.
I would like to see GitHub's project creation and activity charts from today compared to 5 years ago. Similar trends must be happening behind closed doors as well. Techy managers are happy to be building again. Fresh grads are excited about how productive they can be. Scammers are deploying in record time. Business is boomin'.
It's likely that all this code will do more harm than good to the rest of us, but it's definitely out there.
AI might be 100x faster than me at writing code - but writing code is a tiny portion of the work I do. I need to understand the problem before I can write code. I need to understand my whole system. I need to test that my code really works - this is more than 50% of the work I do, and automated tests are not enough - too often the automated test doesn't model the real world in some unexpected way. I review code that others write. I answer technical questions for others. There is a lot of release work, mandatory training, and other overhead as well.
Writing code is what I expect a junior or mid level engineer to spend 20% of their time doing. By the time you reach senior engineer it should be less (though when you write code you are faster and so might write more code despite spending less time on it).
I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that before AI ~0 junior/mid level devs spent just 20% of their time programming. At least not at tech companies
My experience is very different. A junior should be spending >90% of their time coding, a mid level about 75% and a senior about the same. It only really splits after that point. But the senior spending 25% more time on the wrong thing is worse than than them spending 25% less time on the right thing.
It’s only when you get to “lead” (as in people manager) or staff (as in tech unblocked) you should spend the rest of your time improving the productivity of someone who spends more of their time coding than you do.
And that brings us back to square one - if everyone is a 100x engineer, then everyone's again a 1x engineer. Lewis Carroll nailed it with the Red Queen's Race.
This mythical class of developer doesn't exist. Are you trying to tell me that there are a class of developers out there that are doing three months worth of work every single day at the office?
What are some striking examples from your experience?
BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...
On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.
Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.
Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.
The funniest one i've seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.
a better solution would have been to have an industry wide standard icon for the fuel inlet and then an arrow would point on which side of the vehicle it is. The way it is now with the pump icon really can be confusing. If the arrow is pointing right, it seems to be suggesting the driver should go to the right of the pump which is obviously wrong.
I like the way EVs have the squiggly hose icon and that tells you everyting.it doesn't depict the charger station, but the plug point on the vehicle.
Love this announcement style. Direct, confident, and not a word longer than it needs to be. Gives major "the work speaks for itself" vibes. OpenAI's comms used to be like this, until it morphed into Apple-like grandiosity that instead comes off as try-hard.
Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.
Thanks. You understand me. Communication is hard and we have tools for doing a good job, why not using it? Individuals should raise the bar instead of embracing mediocrity.
It’s not sickening at all. Think about this: You’re biased like many people reading it.
It’s easy to get emotionally strung along by his first person narrative but you need to think bigger. You need to construct avatars for the wife and for the child and visualize the emotional damage done to them. What he did isn’t trivial. He lied and manipulated his wife and had a child with her. That is a fucking crime. Constructing a total lie and manipulating his partner to sacrifice everything to live that lie with him and then to bring a child into that lie and force him to grow up with it.
I think people like you are blind. It’s one thing to disagree with me but to call what I said sickening? You enjoy upending lives and manipulating people? Maybe you’re sick?
No that’s not true at all. I’m not going to fall for your trope of just calling people sick without understanding their perspective. You’re not sick. Just stupid. you are biased and you aren’t thinking from the perspective of the lives he has ruined all in the name of emotional cowardice of admitting who he is. I get how hard it is, but it doesn’t justify what he did.
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