I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.

I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.

Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.