100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before. I strongly doubt that is happening for an individual.

> But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Each of these three sentences are in need of some evidence. I'm not actually seing any signs of software velocity notably increasing anywhere. Except perhaps in the AI-reseller sphere, but that seems mostly due to throwing huge amounts of VC money at it and a lack of quality control.

AI is turning 1x engineers into 0.3x engineers claiming to be 100x engineers.

I can believe that the difference between the slowest programmer in the world and the fastest AI aided programmer in the world is now 100x in terms of lines of code output. Like I can imagine a programmer writing 250 lines of code per week by hand and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

10x? The most generous studies I know give up to a 50% improvement.

Name a single project that has a 10x increase. I mean real production ready code, not some single person hobby project.

I'm not say it's pure hype. Not in the sense of previous hype waves like the metaverse or NFCs. It clearly has uses.

I do think it is hype as a killer of knowledge work. It can certainly remove a lot of friction in the kind of borderline mechanical work that you'd formerly outsource to the lowest priced denominator, serve as an idea bouncer, remove friction for bug tracing, etc.

Attempts to cross the next line ("no need for architecture discussions, ai plans", "no need to read the code, ai reviews", and so on), nope.

As someone else mentioned, 100x is a couple days producing the outcomes (remember, not output) of a year. Or for a team, iOS delivering in a single year ten times as many features as its entire previous existence. It's not something that doesn't get noticed.

> And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

At my large org (+100 engineers), I'd say it's a mixed bag and the overall impact of AI rollout looks to be slightly negative productivity.

They probably won't say it publicly though.

It's not because some people are more productive with it that all of them are and it certainly doesn't mean that the company itself is more productive either as you have other things than code to take into account.