Do not; vibe code from top down (ex. Make me a UI with React, with these buttons and these behaviors to each button)
Do not; chat casually with it. (ex. I think it would look better if the button was green)
Do; constrain phrasing to the next data transform goal (ex. You must add a function to change all words that start with lowercase to start with uppercase)
Do; vibe code bottom up (ex. You must generate a file with a function to open a plaintext file and appropriate tests; now you must add a function to count all words that begin with "f")
Do; stick to must/should/may (ex. You must extend the code with this next function)
Do; constrain it to mathematical abstractions (ex. sys prompt: You must not use loops, you must only use recursion and functional paradigms. You must not make up abstractions and stick to mathematical objects and known algorithms)
Do; constrain it to one file per type and function. This makes it quick to review, regenerate only what needs to change.
Using those patterns, Gemini 2.5 and 3 have cranked out banging code with little wandering off in the weeds and hallucinating.
Programming has been mired in made up semantics of the individual coder for the luls, to create mystique and obfuscate the truth to ensure job security; end of the day it's matrix math and state sync between memory and display.
I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.
I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take?
Do you still charge your clients the same?
This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;)
In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%.
It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".
Here we have claims of objective results, but also admissions we’re not even tracking estimations and are terrible at making them when we do. People are notoriously bad at estimating actual time spent versus output, particularly when dealing with unwanted work. We’re missing the fundamental criteria of assessment, and there are known biases unaccounted for.
Output in LOC has never been the issue, copy and paste handles that just fine. TCO and holistic velocity after a few years is a separate matter. Masterful orchestration of agents could include estimation and tracking tasks with minimal overhead. That’s not what we’re seeing though…
Someone who has even a 20% better method for deck construction is gonna show me some timetables, some billed projects, and a very fancy new car. If accepting Mothra as my lord and saviour is a prerequisite to pierce an otherwise impenetrable veil of ontological obfuscation in order to see the unseeable? That deck might not be as cheap as it sounds, one way or the other.
I’m getting a nice learning and productivity bump from LLMs, there are incredible capabilities available. But premature optimization is still premature, and claims of silver bullets are yet to be demonstrated.
Yes, that would be cool. An hour later, I shipped a release build with that feature fully functional, including permissions plus a calibration UI that shows if your face is detected and lets you adjust sensitivity, and visually displays when a nod is detected. Most of that work got done while I was in the shower. That is the second feature in this app that got built today.
This morning I also created and deployed a bug fix release for analytics on one platform, and a brand-new report (fairly easy to put together because it followed the pattern of other reports) for a different platform.
I also worked out, argued with random people on HN and walked to work. Not bad for five hours! Do I know how long it would have taken to, for example, integrate face detection and tracking into a C++ audio plugin without assistance from AI? Especially given that I have never done that before? No, I do not. I am bad at estimating. Would it have been longer than 30 minutes? I mean...probably?
If I know someone as an honest and serious professional, and they tell me that some tool has made them 5x or 10x more productive, then I'm willing to believe that the tool really did make a big difference for them and their specific work. I would be far more sceptical if they told me that a tool has made them 10% more productive.
I might have some questions about how much technical debt was accumulated in the process and how much learning did not happen that might be needed down the road. How much of that productivity gain was borrowed from the future?
But I wouldn't dismiss the immediate claims out of hand. I think this experience is relevant as a starting point for the science that's needed to make more general claims.
Also, let's not forget that almost none of the choices we make as software engineers are based on solid empirical science. I have looked at quite a few studies about productivity and defect rates in software engineering projects. The methodology is almost always dodgy and the conclusions seem anything but robust to me.
To extend the analogy: why charge clients for your labor anymore, which Claude can supposedly do in a fraction of the time? Why not just ask if they have heard the good word, so to speak?
What a total crock. Your prose reminds of of the ridiculously funny Mike Meyers in "The Love Guru".
The second you get to a place where the mapping isn’t there though, it goes off rails quickly.
Not everyone programs in such a way that they may ever experience this but I have, as a Staff engineer at a large firm, run into this again and again.
It’s great for greenfield projects that follow CRUD patterns though.
do such things exist?
It will take you 2.5 months to accomplish what would have taken you five years, that is the kind of productivity increase you’re describing.
It doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not sure that going from assembly to python would even have such a ludicrous productivity enhancement.
$100 / hour * 100 hours
to
$100 / hour * 500 hours
not to
$500 / hour * 100 hours
in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good