The 100x developer claim doesn't add up
100x Developers
A skeptical look at the AI-era boast of "100x developers." The author argues the math is implausible: at 100x, three days of work would equal a full year's 260 working days. He grants big multipliers for beginners, tiny tasks, or solo personal projects, but says corporate product teams seeing a 2x improvement are already doing great.
I bet that most developers claiming to be 10x because of AI are working on a personal projects or uni-personal companies.
- danielciocirlan
> 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.
- krmmalik
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.
- d_silin
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"
- evklein
> 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.
- TrackerFF
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.