> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality.
Below is based on my experience using (currently) mostly GPT-5 with open source code assistants.
For a new project with straightforward functionality? I think you (and "you" being "basically anybody who can code at all") can probably manage to go 10x the pace of a junior engineer of yesteryear.
Things get a lot trickier when you have complex business logic to express and backwards compatibility to maintain in an existing codebase. Writing out these kinds of requirements in natural language is its own skillset (which can be developed), and this process takes time in and of itself.
The more confusing the requirements, the more error prone the process becomes though. The model can do things "correctly" but oops maybe you forgot something in your description, and now the whole thing will be wrong. And the fact that you didn't write the code means that you missed out on your opportunity to fix / think about stuff in the first pass of implementation (i.e. you need to seriously review stuff, which also slow you down).
Sometimes iterating over English instructions will take longer than just writing/expressing things in code from the start. But sometimes it will be a lot faster too.
Basically the easy stuff is way easier but the more complex stuff is still going to require a lot of hand holding and a lot of manual review.
Below is based on my experience using (currently) mostly GPT-5 with open source code assistants.
For a new project with straightforward functionality? I think you (and "you" being "basically anybody who can code at all") can probably manage to go 10x the pace of a junior engineer of yesteryear.
Things get a lot trickier when you have complex business logic to express and backwards compatibility to maintain in an existing codebase. Writing out these kinds of requirements in natural language is its own skillset (which can be developed), and this process takes time in and of itself.
The more confusing the requirements, the more error prone the process becomes though. The model can do things "correctly" but oops maybe you forgot something in your description, and now the whole thing will be wrong. And the fact that you didn't write the code means that you missed out on your opportunity to fix / think about stuff in the first pass of implementation (i.e. you need to seriously review stuff, which also slow you down).
Sometimes iterating over English instructions will take longer than just writing/expressing things in code from the start. But sometimes it will be a lot faster too.
Basically the easy stuff is way easier but the more complex stuff is still going to require a lot of hand holding and a lot of manual review.