Claude Code has honestly made me at least 10x more productive. I’ve burned through about 3 billion tokens and have been consistently merging 5+ PRs a day, tackling tons of tech debt, improving GitHub Actions, and making crazy progress on product work
only 10x? I'm at least 100x as productive. I only type at a measly 100wpm, whereas Claude can output 100+ tokens a second
I'm outputting a PR every 6 minutes. The reviewers are using Claude to review everything. It used to take a day to add 100 lines to the codebase.. now I can add 100 lines in one prompt
If I want even more productivity (at risk of making the rest of my team look slow) I can tell Claude to output double the lines and ship it off for review. My performance metrics are incredible
So no human reads the actual code that you push to production? Are you not worried about security risks, spaghetti code, and other issues? Or does Claude magically make all of those concerns go away?
This is only the beginning. I can see myself having 100 Claude tasks running concurrently - the only problem is edits clash between files. I'm working on having Claude solve this by giving each instance its own repo to work with, then I ask the final Claude to mash it all together as best it can
What's 100x productivity multiplied by 100 instances of Claude? 10,000x productivity
Now to be fair and a bit more realistic it's not actually 10000x because it takes longer to push the PR because the file sizes are so big. Let's call it 9800x. That's still a sizable improvement
I also have this feeling that I'm 2-10x more productive. But isn't it curious how a lot of devs feel this way, but no devs that I know have the experience that any of their colleagues have become 2-10x more productive?
<raises hand> Our automated test folks were chronically behind, struggling to keep up with feature development. I got the two assigned to the team that was the most behind set up with Claude Code. Six weeks later they are fully caught up, expanding coverage, and integrating AI code review into our build pipeline.
It's not 10x, but those guys do seem like they've hit somewhere around 2x improvement overall.
Sometimes 10x can mean that I start things that I would have never started before, knowing it would take a long time. Or that I can have any of the agentic stuff "explore" libs, stacks and frameworks I wanted to look at, but had no time. Or distill some vague docs and blog posts to find common use cases for tech x. And so on.
It's not always a literal 10x time for taskA w/ AI vs taskA w/o AI...
What type of work do you do and what type of code do you produce?
Because I've found it to work pretty amazingly for things that don't need to be exact (like data modeling) or don't have any security implications (public apps). But for everything else I end up having to find all the little bugs by reading the code line by line, which is much slower than just writing the code in the first place.
How do you maintain high confidence in the code it generates ?
My current bottleneck is having to review the huge amounts of code that these models spit out. I do TDD, use auto-linting and type-checking.... but the model makes insidious changes that are only visible on deep inspection.
You have to review your code for quality and bugs and errors now just as you did last month or last year. Did you never write bugs accidentally before?
We're all bottlenecked on reviewing now. That's a good thing.
There was a greater awareness of exactly what I'd written. By definition, I would not have written those bugs in, as long as I had known edge cases in my mind.
Lapses of judgement and syntax errors happen, but they're easier to spot because you know exactly what you're looking at. When code is written by a model, I have to review it 3 times.
1st to understand the code. 2nd to identify lapses in suspicious areas. 3rd to confirm my suspicions through interactive tests, because the model can use patterns I'm unfamiliar with, and it takes me some googling to confirm if certain patterns used by the model are outright bugs or not. The biggest time sink is fixing an identified bug, because now you're doing it in someone-else's (model's) legacy code rather than a greenfield feature implementation.
It's a big productivity bump. But, if reviewing is the bottleneck, then that upper bounds the productivity gains at ~4x for me. Still incredible technology, but the death of software-engineering that it is claimed to be.
