Simon Willison’s Weblog

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive (via) Colton Voege on "curing your AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome".

There's a lot of rhetoric out there suggesting that if you can't 10x your productivity through tricks like running a dozen Claude Code instances at once you're falling behind. Colton's piece here is a pretty thoughtful exploration of why that likely isn't true. I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of this article.

I'm a pretty huge proponent for AI-assisted development, but I've never found those 10x claims convincing. I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.

That's not too far from this article's assumptions. From the article:

I wouldn't be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn't translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.

I think that's an under-estimation - I suspect engineers that really know how to use this stuff effectively will get more than a 0.2x increase - but I do think all of the other stuff involved in building software makes the 10x thing unrealistic in most cases.