I recently needed to adjust an existing open source model for an app that I am building, to get it to work in a certain way. I have no background in machine learning.

Claude was able to identify the approach that worked, and even the long Python command that was needed. In, yes, probably about 10 seconds.

For me to figure that out myself, it probably would've taken something like a year of study. Of the entire stack of machine learning and all of the Python tooling associated with it.

That's where these absolutely incredible astonishing speedups come from.

Because it's one thing for Claude to be able to write code 20 times faster than I can. But it's a whole other thing when it is able to create things in domains that I know nothing about at all. That would take me one or more years to become an expert in. But where I can still just verify its results, so I don't need to be an expert in order to judge the quality or suitability. If the end product works, the end product works.

I have similarly had it come up with mathematical formulas that would probably have taken me a year in going back to studying math if I had to derive them myself. But where it is trivial to show that they are producing the correct output for known test cases.

So trying to come up with some kind of factor multiplier here almost kind of falls apart. It might as well be infinite. Because these are things that I just wouldn't have done otherwise. The software wouldn't have gotten built because I would have had to hire somebody else to do it, and there was no budget for that.