alt Hacker NewsIt's more like ∞x (or N/Ax if you prefer) because the majority of the projects I did with LLM agents wouldn't have existed without them, because I would've never found enough time to work on them.
One of the latest things I made with Claude was a tool that allowed me to move a bunch of very low traffic Cloud Run services to a single VPS without losing any of the Cloud Run benefits such as easy Docker-based deployment and automatic certificate provisioning. I thought about making something like that for quite some time, and Claude finally made it possible, which makes me quite happy.
The fun thing here is that no other soul genuinely cares about it, or any other code I might publish. The code, especially AI generated, is so cheap that if anyone wants to repeat my steps to get rid of Cloud Run services, they will probably vibe-code their own tool instead of figuring out how to use mine, just like I did that instead of spending time on learning Dokku or similar solutions.
So, yes, 10x and more, but no one cares about the result, which makes the whole 10x measurement less useful.
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The incredulity at 10x claims is often unearned because how much do these skeptics actually notice and appreciate the depth of work of ten developers collaborating on something (if not their own org)? Dev output slips by quietly. There are reams of unnoticed projects even at the scale of a life’s work.
There have been plenty of libraries/tools that got people from "I would like to do foo" to "oh, this tool makes foo possible in under 10 hours, I should start working on foo" in the past. LLMs have done this for many foos, which is great.
But I'm with hansvm - I haven't actually seen anyone plausibly maintain 10x. 10x is different from getting people past their activation cost.