[HN Gopher] Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20-50x faster than I...
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Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20-50x faster than I did 5 years
ago
I've been meaning to write this up because it's been surprisingly
repeatable, and I wish someone had described it to me earlier.
Over the last year or so, my development speed relative to my own
baseline from ~2019 is easily 20x, sometimes more. Not because I
type faster, or because I cut corners, but because I changed how I
use AI. The short version: I don't use AI inside my editor. I use
two AIs in parallel, in the browser, with full context. Here's the
setup. I keep two tabs open: One AI that acts as a "builder". It
gets a lot of context and does the heavy lifting. One AI that acts
as a reviewer. It only sees diffs and tries to find mistakes.
That's it. No plugins, no special tooling. Just browser tabs and a
terminal. The important part is context. Instead of asking for
snippets, I paste entire files or modules and explain the goal. I
ask the AI to explain the approach first, including tradeoffs,
before it writes code. That forces me to stay in control of
architecture instead of accepting a blob I don't understand. A
typical flow looks like this: 1. Paste several related files
(often across languages). 2. Describe the change I want and ask
for an explanation of options. Read and summarize concepts,
wikipedia, etc. 3. Pick an approach. Have extensive conversations
about trade-offs, concepts, adversarial security etc. Find ways to
do things that the OS allows. 4. Let the AI implement it across
all files. 5. Copy the diff into the second AI and ask it to look
for regressions, missing arguments, or subtle breakage. 6. Fix
whatever it finds. Ship. The second AI catches a lot of things I
would otherwise miss when moving fast. Things like "you changed
this call signature but didn't update one caller" or "this default
value subtly changed behavior". What surprised me is how much
faster cross-stack work gets. Stuff that used to stall because it
crossed boundaries (Swift - Obj-C - JS, or backend - frontend)
becomes straightforward because the AI can reason across all of it
at once. I'm intentionally strict about "surgical edits". I don't
let the AI rewrite files unless that's explicitly the task. I ask
for exact lines to add or change. That keeps diffs small and
reviewable. This is very different from autocomplete-style tools.
Those are great for local edits, but they still keep you as the
integrator across files. This approach flips that: you stay the
architect and reviewer, the AI does the integration work, and a
second AI sanity-checks it. Costs me about $40/month total. The
real cost is discipline: always providing context, always reviewing
diffs, and never pasting code you don't understand. I'm sharing
this because it's been a genuine step-change for me, not a gimmick.
Happy to answer questions about limits, failure modes, or where
this breaks down. Here is a wiki-type overview I put together for
our developers on our team: https://community.intercoin.app/t/ai-
assisted-development-playbook-how-we-ship-faster-without-breaking-
things/2950
Author : EGreg
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-12-30 19:19 UTC (7 days ago)
| chrisjj wrote:
| But you aren't writing code. You are getting a machine to do it.
| EGreg wrote:
| That could be said about compiling higher-level languages
| instead of rolling your own assembly and garbage collector.
| It's just working on a higher level. You're a lot more
| productive with, say, PHP than you are writing assembly.
|
| I architect of it and go through many iterations. The machine
| makes mistakes, when I test I have to come back and work
| through the issues. I often correct the machine about stuff it
| doesn't know, or missed due to its training.
|
| And ultimately I'm responsible for the code quality, I'm still
| in the loop all the time. But rather than writing everything by
| hand, following documentation and make a mistake, I have the
| machine do the code generation and edits for a lot of the code.
| There are still mistakes that need to be corrected until
| everything works, but the loop is a lot faster.
|
| For example, I was able to port our MySQL adapter to PostGres
| AND Sqlite, something that I had been putting off for years, in
| about 3-5 hours total, including testing and bugfixes and
| massive refactoring. And it's still not in the main branch
| because there is more testing I want to have done before it's
| merged:
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf...
|
| Here is my first speedrun:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
| chrisjj wrote:
| > That could be said about compiling higher-level languages
|
| You write the program as source code.
|
| Prompting an LLM to cobble together lines from other people's
| work is not writing a program.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "You write the program as source code."
|
| His language is LLM prompts. If he can check them into git
| and get reasonably consistent results if he ran the prompts
| multiple times, just like we expect from our JavaScript or
| C or assembly or machine code, I don't see the problem.
|
| I knew a guy who could patch a running program by flipping
| switches on the front panel of a computer. He didn't argue
| my C language output 'is not writing a program'...
| eloisius wrote:
| Not to be too rude, but this looks like a bunch of 2010-style
| procedural PHP string concatenation spaghetti. Data mappers
| and ORMs are pretty much a solved problem. Why write your own
| as part of your platform? If you're writing this much
| boilerplate to reimplement solved problems, it's no wonder
| you're able to get a lot of help from an LLM.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| He's not even generating his own electricity
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I curious how you paste diffs into the Ai. And wouldnt a coding
| assistant in the IDE be a much more convenient solution?
| ninju wrote:
| If you have the changes as a GitHub PR you can add _.diff_ to
| the end of the URL to get a single page of all the changes
|
| Citation: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6188624
| EGreg wrote:
| Not convenient for me. I just do git diff | mate and copypaste.
| eloisius wrote:
| Can you say anything about where you were five years ago? Or how
| your ability to write and ship code from 2015 to 2020 changed?
| It's hard to believe all these 50x AI productivity claims,
| especially without an idea of what that multiplier applies to and
| what the right side of the equation even means. Is it lines
| written, dollar amounts of impact, pull requests merged?
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes, you can follow my code from 5 and 10 years ago here:
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform-History-v1
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform-History-v2
|
| And you can see the latest code here:
|
| https://github.com/Qbix
|
| Documentation can be created a lot faster, including for
| normies:
|
| https://community.qbix.com/t/membership-plans-and-discounts/...
|
| My favorite part of AI is red-teaming and finding bugs. Just
| copypaste diffs and ask it for regressions. Press it over and
| over until it can't find any.
|
| Here is a speedrun from a few days ago:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
| vemv wrote:
| Most likely you are creating boilerplate at 20x/50x, as opposed
| to genuinely new concepts, mechanisms, etc.
|
| To be fair, most web/mobile frameworks expect you to do that.
|
| Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json
| describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Precisely what I was going to say. As domain specificity
| increases, LLM output quality rapidly decreases.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| There's three types of work in software:
|
| - Commodity work, such as CRUD, integrations, infra plumbing,
| standard patterns.
|
| - Local novelty, i.e. a new feature for your product (but not
| new to the world).
|
| - Frontier novelty, as in, genuinely new algorithms/research-
| like work.
|
| The _overwhelming_ majority of software development is in the
| first two categories. Even people who think they are doing new
| and groundbreaking stuff are almost certainly doing variations
| of things that have been done in other contexts.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes, there is A LOT of boilerplate that is sped up by AI. Every
| time I interface with a new service or API, I don't have to
| carefully read the documentation and write it by hand (or
| copypaste examples), I can literally have the AI do the first
| draft, grok it, test it, and iterate. Often times the AI misses
| latest developments, and I have to research things myself and
| fix code, explain the new capabilities, then the AI can be used
| again, but in the end it's still about 20x faster.
| woah wrote:
| > Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json
| describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.
|
| The problem with this configuration based approach is that now
| the actual code that executes has to be able to change its
| functionality arbitrarily in response to new configuration, and
| the code (and configuration format) needs to be extremely
| abstracted and incomprehensible. In the real world, someone
| figures out that things get way easier if you just put a few
| programming language concepts into the configuration format,
| and now you're back where you started but with a much worse
| programming language (shoehorned into a configuration format)
| than you were using before.
|
| Boilerplate may be cumbersome, but it effectively gives you a
| very large number of places to "hook into" the framework to
| make it do what you need. AI makes boilerplate much less
| painful to write.
| macNchz wrote:
| Working on a system like this (mostly configured with complex
| yaml, but extended with a little DSL/rule engine to handle
| more complex situations) a long while ago, I introduced a bug
| that cost the company quite a bit of money by using `True`
| instead of `true`--something that would have been readily
| caught in a proper language with real tooling.
| vemv wrote:
| That would be caught by any schema validation system at
| runtime, e.g. Zod in typescript, Malli in Clojure, and so
| on.
| vemv wrote:
| There are always middle grounds to be explored. The way I see
| it, 80% of a "codebase" would be data and 20%, code.
|
| Both worlds can be cleanly composed. For instance, for
| backend development, it's common to define an array (data) of
| middleware (code).
|
| At a smaller scale, this is already a reality in the Clojure
| ecosystem - most sql is data (honeysql library), and most
| html is data (Hiccup library).
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| >> Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json
| describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.
|
| Be very careful with this approach. there are many ways it can
| go completely wrong. i've seen a codebase like this and it was
| a disaster to debug. because you can't set breakpoints in data.
| it was a disaster.
|
| It may not look compact or elegant but I'd rather see
| debuggable and comprehensible boiler point even if it's
| repetitive rather than a mess
| zahlman wrote:
| Most of the post reads like "boilerplate created at 20x/50x" to
| me, too, frankly.
| hu3 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your methodology. And ignore the rude people
| that it might attract please.
|
| I might start using a second LLM to review the diffs. Something
| like Gemini 3 Fast. Sounds good.
|
| But I don't want to give up on a fancy IDE to use browser tabs.
|
| So I think I will ask the second LLM to review the `git diff`.
| EGreg wrote:
| Here is what it looks like, if I were to livestream it for 4
| hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
| hu3 wrote:
| thanks. I'll take a look later
| germandiago wrote:
| If you can do this and you do not build your own company you are
| wasting your time in some way, IMHO.
|
| It has lots of potential. Let me, though, have my own... doubts
| about it. Thanks for sharing anyway.
| EGreg wrote:
| I already built 2 companies and building a third.
|
| https://linkedin.com/in/magarshak
| ryandv wrote:
| I don't know. You may as well say that after reading Uncle Bob's
| Clean Code and adding 50 layers of indirection, you are now
| writing at "enterprise scale." Perhaps you even hired an Agile
| SCUM consultant, and now look at your velocity (at least they're
| measuring _something_ )!
|
| Use my abstract factory factories and inversion of control
| containers. With Haskell your entire solution is just a 20-line
| mapreduce in a monad transformer stack over IO. In J, it's 20
| characters.
|
| I don't see how AI differs. Rather, the last study of
| significance found that devs were gaslighting themselves into
| believing they were more productive, when the data actually bore
| the opposite conclusion [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
| _philipalan wrote:
| actual lol
| SCdF wrote:
| To be clear you believe that you do a year's worth of work in one
| week? Every week? So halfway through this year you will have done
| 25 years of work?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| OP has got 200 years of experience under their belt now.
| ge96 wrote:
| That's a FAANG level resume right there
| EGreg wrote:
| In a sense, yes. If you compare how long it would take me to do
| it manually about 15 years ago.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| He was just not doing his job 95% of the time.
| perrygeo wrote:
| 50x more code? Absolutely plausible. 50x more ideas
| implemented, or 50x better ideas? Doubtful. Generating code
| doesn't generate value.
| 63stack wrote:
| I so wish just one of these posts with these insane ~20-50x
| claims would include a narrated video of someone using it, or
| show us a repository with the code, or anything tangible.
| ryandv wrote:
| Yes... I've asked for the same - show us the goods with a
| Destroy All Software style screencast; otherwise the default
| position is that this entire HN post is just more AI generated
| hallucination.
|
| Nobody's taken me up on this offer yet. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325469
| eterm wrote:
| Do you have a legacy code-base in mind?
|
| I'd happily demonstrate this kind of workflow on my day job
| if not for company trade-secrets.
|
| That's as legacy as it gets, 20+ year old code base with
| several "strata" of different technologies and approaches.
|
| Claude Opus handily navigates around it, and produces working
| bug fixes with minimal guidance.
|
| I'm not going to claim it's 20x or 50x yet, there's still
| navigation and babysitting involved, but it's definitely
| capable of working on complex problems, I just don't trust it
| to run it in YOLO mode.
|
| The key thing is, you need domain knowledge. You need to know
| where to correct it, and which direction to point it in.
|
| It's not magic, and it will have bad ideas. The key picking
| out the good ideas from the bad.
| EGreg wrote:
| Sure. Here is my latest 4-hour speedrun:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
| 63stack wrote:
| I appreciate the video. I see that most of the time it's the
| dialogue with the AI that is in the focus, the code or the
| actual product rarely shows up compared to that (or maybe it
| does? I can't read the text on the video due to the quality).
|
| It's hard to tell where this 20-50x increase is.
| conception wrote:
| I get 10-20x done but that's because most of what I need to get
| done isn't particularly difficult.
|
| E.g. I have an aws agent that does all my devops for me. It
| isn't doing anything insane but when I need to investigate
| something or make a terraform change, I send it off and go do
| something else. I do similar things 20-100 times a day now. Go
| write this script, do this report, update this documentation,
| etc.
|
| I think if you are a high level swe it takes a lot of effort to
| get "better than doing it myself". If you have a more
| generalist role, AI is easily a 10x productivity booster if you
| are knowledgeable about using it.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Out of interest, how did you arrive at the 20-50x speedup
| numbers?
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| vibes, obviously
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| stefanfisk wrote:
| 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?
| jononor wrote:
| Why not merged to main? What is the definition of done being
| applied here?
| hmokiguess wrote:
| You should be using an agent instead of the browser in-app chat,
| it can likely improve the efficiency and easiness of performing
| your workflow by another order of magnitude. Try Claude Code.
| phtrivier wrote:
| As other pointed out, you may very well have a more productive
| setup this way, but providing numbers is rage-bait because we
| don't know where your baseline come from.
|
| Do you ship 20x more PRs ? Did you solve 20x more bugs ? Did you
| add 20x more features ? Did you provide 20x more ARR, more
| values, etc...
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Haven't you really tried an agentic code like Claude Code, Codex,
| AMP...? For "really try" I mean investing some time with it like
| 10-20 hours min to see the things they are good with and how to
| use them well. They are tools and have the corresponding learning
| curve.
|
| I have passed through a phase of copy/pasting from the ChatGPT
| web to autocomplete tools, but the real feeling of "shit, this is
| going to really change how I code" came with Claude Code.
| EGreg wrote:
| Wait how did this appear 3 hours ago, and also got flagged? I
| posted this many days ago! Something is wrong with HN timestamps.
| corysama wrote:
| Lots of good stuff in /newest gets missed. So, HN has an algo
| that selects some posts for a second chance. Looks like your
| post was selected for resurrection.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| Sad that this was flagged. I am a noob but nevertheless a
| perfectionist. I am not afraid of using AI, because I proofread
| everything. So it would have been of interest to me how this
| exactly works. A video maybe.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| It has lots of potential
| pryelluw wrote:
| The real benefit is due to discipline. These models have removed
| a certain amount of friction you had. However, you're now more of
| an editor than a writer. Keep that in mind and don't lose the
| writing muscle.
| gdulli wrote:
| 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.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| 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?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| No, you are doing it exactly right. Code is a liability not
| an asset, hence, technical debt.
| corysama wrote:
| This is similar to the approach touted by Steve Yegge in this
| interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw
|
| I really appreciate that he is up-front about "Yes. Vibe coding
| has lots of dangerous problems that you must learn to control if
| you are to go whole-hog like this."
|
| Has anyone read his _Vibe Coding_ book? The Amazon reviews make
| it sound like it 's heavy on inspiration but light on techniques.
| tonymet wrote:
| great testimony it would be great to hear about what was
| produced.
| haute_cuisine wrote:
| 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.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Yep, wait until he's done replacing COBOL completely in 5 years
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| We badly need to set some sort of standards on what constitutes a
| product for the purposes of "productivity." It's well-defined
| economically, revenue earned by a firm per labor hour. Are you
| earning 50x the revenue per hour of work or have you just pushed
| 50x lines of code into a repo with an automated build pipeline?
| Do you have 50x the users? Any users at all?
|
| I try to think of what this would look like at my company and I
| can't even really conceive of what this dream scenario is
| supposed to be. We have maybe 6-10 legitimately revenue-earning
| products with a meaningful user base and it took about a decade
| to get there. There is no reasonable world in which you say we
| could have done that in 10 weeks instead, which would be roughly
| 1/50th the time. It takes at least that long typically just to
| get a contract completed once a prospective customer decides they
| even want to make a purchase. Writing code faster won't speed
| that process up. Can we push features 50x faster? No, we can't,
| because they come as a response to feature requests from users,
| which means we need to wait to have users who make such requests,
| and you can't just compress 10 years of that happening into 10
| weeks. That's to say nothing of the fact that what we work on now
| is a response to market and ecosystem conditions now, not
| conditions as they were 10 years ago. If we'd pushed what we were
| doing now to having done it then instead, we'd have just been
| working on the wrong things.
|
| Think about what it would mean to produce cars 50x faster than
| using current processes. What good would that even do? The
| current processes already produce all the cars the world needs.
| Making them 50x faster wouldn't give you a larger customer base.
| You'd just be making things no one needs and then throwing them
| away. The only sensible version of this is doing the same thing
| at roughly the same speed but at 1/50th the cost. I don't doubt
| that faster code generation can cut cost but not to 1/50th. Too
| much of the cost in creating and running a company has nothing at
| all to do with output.
|
| Show us the financial statements from your company you started in
| 2019 and your company today. I would be absolutely thrilled to
| see somebody concretely show they earn the same revenue for
| 1/50the the cost, or 50x revenue for the same cost. The fact that
| you push 50x the number of commits or lines of code to Github
| means nothing to me.
| hattmall wrote:
| Faster doesn't mean more money, it just means less time. The
| bottleneck in revenue is very rarely purely software related.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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
| when you said that you were pasting code.
|
| I'm pretty much begging you to install and use Cursor. Whatever
| boost you're getting from your current workflow, you will see
| triple through use of their Agent/Plan/Debug modes, especially
| when using Opus 4.5. I promise you: it's a before electricity vs
| after electricity scenario. I'm actually excited for you.
|
| A lot of folks will tell you to use Claude Code. I personally
| find that it doesn't make sense for the sorts of projects I work
| on; I would 100% start with Cursor either way.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| Can you actually provide any proof, even top-line stats from
| GitHub or other software forges that show the productivity
| boost you're claiming?
|
| It's not up to the skeptics to prove this tech doesn't work,
| it's up to the proponents to show it does and does so with a
| similar effect size as cigarettes cause lung cancer.
|
| There are a tremendous amount of LLM productivity stans on HN
| but the plural of anecdote is not data.
|
| Certainly these tools are useful, but the extent to which they
| are useful today is not nearly as open and shut as you and
| others would claim. I'd say that these tools make me 5% more
| productive on a code base I know well.
|
| I'm totally open to opposing evidence that isn't just anecdote
| ghthor wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious that is the OP automates this
| manual part of their workflow that it will improve their
| iteration speed. The thread root is just saying stop copy and
| pasting and use the built in tooling to communicate with the
| LLM apis
| Klonoar wrote:
| They aren't responding to thread roots extended comment,
| just the first part about the tone and rhetoric of AI
| proponents. Your comment isnt really a response to anything
| in their comment.
| judahmeek wrote:
| "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?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Even with scripting languages the discussion is always about what
| people want to program in, not what users wish the language was.
| AI seems the same way, it's always about how much stuff is being
| generated, never about how much happier actual users are with
| whatever the output is.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Are you saying AI for commercial day job or is this something for
| personal project workflows?
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Also, AI is great but it hasn't improved by ability to solve
| Leetcode problem any faster.
|
| Anyone experiencing this problem as well?
| usefulposter wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510369
| akomtu wrote:
| So, you effectively have 20-50 developers of your caliber doing
| work for you for free? You must be running your own company now.
|
| The reality is probably simpler: you've automated a good deal of
| busywork that you would never have done otherwise.
| fragmede wrote:
| > One AI that acts as a "builder".
|
| Not to be a dick, but only one? I won't brag about how many I do
| have running, but it's more than one.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Anyone else just thoroughly sick of this AI bullshit? I feel like
| after this post OP probably went and fapped to their portrait.
| Lets be real here. If AI is making you "50x faster" you're
| probably not working on hard problems.
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