logoalt Hacker News

Aurornisyesterday at 5:35 PM2 repliesview on HN

> I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time.

In my experience, the people who 10X their output with Claude Code fit one of two categories:

1. They're not really taking the time to understand the code they're submitting. They might do a skim over the output and see that it looks reasonable and passes tests, but they aren't taking time to understand the code as if they were pair programming. Only when it breaks and the LLM can't patch it up quickly do they go in and fully understand the code.

2. They moved very slowly before Claude Code. I've had some coworkers who would take 2-3 days to get a simple PR out because, to be frank, their work days weren't full of a lot of work. Every time they'd run into a question they'd stop and then bumble around for a few hours until they could talk to the ticket creator about it. They'd get tired of working on a task by 2PM and then save the rest of the work for tomorrow. They'd get an idea and decide to rewrite the PR the next day, and on and on with distractions. When they start using Claude Code the LLM doesn't have the same holdups, so now every time where they were getting stuck or tired before is replaced by an LLM powering through to some solution. Their cognitive load is reduced so they're no longer freezing up during the day. They aren't really becoming 10X engineers like they think, but really just catching up to normal pace


Replies

rockostrichyesterday at 5:53 PM

I don't know if we're all 10x'ing but our entire org is shipping PRs using an in-house framework akin to Stripe's Minions [1] and many of those PRs are generated from Slack. We definitely have work to do on the latter part of the SDLC to have more confidence in these changes but we can still rely on the existing observability layer to make sure things are working as expected.

Another commenter mentioned that Docker, git, etc. were all tools that greatly enhanced productivity and coding agents are just another tool that does that. I would agree, but argue that it's more impactful than all of those tools combined.

[1] https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-...

shuntressyesterday at 10:01 PM

Regarding point #2, while it is of course entirely possible that they are slackers it is more likely that they lack the knowledge you are leveraging in order to declare that the PRs are "simple"