edit: if you're seeing a slow down in PRs, it's more likely that 10 of your 10x'ers are slinging code in 3-4 plus accounts in codex on the side during their shift on 8 startups.
If you want to drive at high speed, you need to build a highway first.
Claude Code TUI, probably the poster child for AI-driven coding, itself is still going to sh*t.
Google Search: 1998
Gmail: 2004
Google Map: 2005
Google Docs: 2006
Chrome: 2008
vs
Claude 3 (+ tool calling, web search): 2024
Claude Code: 2025
Claude Design, Sheet, Data: 2026
"We" (whatever it means) are shipping faster now, no?
I think people already have forgotten how long and arduous software development was just a few years ago.
The biggest bottleneck now is CI/CD/Experimentation with respect to engineering, and product alignment with respect to the business.
"One occasionally reads newspaper accounts of how two programmers in a remodeled garage have built an important program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams. And every programmer is prepared to believe such tales, for he knows that he could build any program much faster than the 1000 statements/year reported for industrial teams. Why then have not all industrial programming teams been replaced by dedicated garage duos? One must look at what is being produced."
Brooks argues that the coding that happened in the garage only is a fraction of what you need for the final product:
"It costs nine times as much. But it is the truly useful object, the intended product of most system programming efforts."
What we're seeing right now does not feel much different. You can greatly accelerate a first draft, a greenfield project, an experiment, or at least the initial iteration of one. Changing a live production system or a widely used library is an entirely different proposition.
More to the point, the price of RAM that has gone berserk. Easy solution, let's then make our OSes, browsers and almost all the relevant software that we use day to day an order a magnitude more nimble, for example if a Chrome instance now eats 1-2GB of memory then make it it at most 100-200MBs of said memory while doing the exact same things (if not more). The much lauded AI revolution in code-writing hasn't created that, not sure if it will ever do, it will just add slop after slop after slop, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if the memory requirements for something like Chrome won't increase as a result of the recent vibe-coding mania.
But by this point the AI zealots are already running the asylum, so nothing to be done.
Pre coding : Requirements, grooming, solutioning (cross product specially), design, LLD
Post coding: Cross product testing, E2E integration testing, CRQ approvals, Deployment, pilot, roll out.
SWEs don't just do coding. AI has only solved that and testing to an extent.
EQYV•19m ago
jayd16•16m ago
At least in entertainment I only see cancelled products rapidly increasing.
tikotus•14m ago
marcosdumay•8m ago
meric_•13m ago
I think it would be more widespread if there wasn't as much pushback against AI. Big Walk disclosed they used ai to fix a bug and it immediately got review bombed. Kids on Roblox don't care as much, so you can see just how transformative it has been there.
moron4hire•8m ago
ben_w•7m ago
adriand•5m ago
> Customer email, 9:42 am: "I have a partner asking for our SSH2 public key. I tried using Tediware help but eventually it said to contact support. Are you able to assist?"
> Response, 10:47 am: "You need to generate a key pair yourself and keep the private key. Tediware does not issue SSH keys. Here's what you do. [instructions follow]"
> Follow-up response, 12:20 pm: "Generating your own key pair is now part of the app."
> Time from support request to new feature designed, coded, tested, deployed and announced: 2 hours, 38 minutes.
Side note, this feature has been solid in prod ever since (that story is a couple of months old).
Obviously, some things take weeks still, but they're hard. I just finished writing an X12 translator/parser, from scratch, in Rust. The old translator/parser was written in Ruby and ran documents at 175 kb/s. The new one handles 1 MB/s. It took me seven weeks of on-again/off-again dev work, fuzzing, testing, etc. It went live in prod yesterday.
AnotherGoodName•1m ago
“Sure there’s a massive increase in the number of apps on the app stores, there’s new examples of decompiled and recompiled games popping up all the time not to mention all the vibe coded games, many companies are reporting they have new bespoke vibe coded tools to do some task they used to do manually, people are just cloning popular apps like photoshop with bespoke customisations to their needs..” etc.
I already know the tiresome response to any such example given by people of this mindset. “Yeah but those aren’t examples of users getting features faster!” Whatever.