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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

If you were 20x faster you'd have done an entire career's worth of progress this year.

Have you? Are you making tons of money? Have you achieved 20x the amount than you have all previous years?

Take a step back and realize what you're claiming here.

While the multiplier is less for me ( perhaps 3x or 4x ) I think the assumption that productivity gain leads to directly to more money is bit optimistic. Unless you are self employed, or run your own company, and actually get paid by results, being more efficient is seldom paid much. ( with luck you get promotion every two years or so or pay raise every year )

I have worked for too long in the field, but this year and simply thanks to the LLMs I have actually managed to get 4 usable hobby projects done ( as far as I need them to go anyway - personal tools that I use and publish but do not actively maintain unless I need some new feature ), and I have been quite productive with stack I do not normally use at our startup. Most previous years I have finished 0-1 hobby projects.

The ramp up period for new stack was much less, and while I still write some code myself, most of it at least starts as LLM output which I review and adjust to what I really want. It is bit less intellectually satisfying but a lot more efficient way to work for me. And ultimately for work at least I care more about good enough results.

Completely unrelated, but what’s with the spaces inside the parenthesis here? It’s super weird (and leads to incorrect text layout with a standalone parenthesis at the end or beginning of a line…)

When it comes to small focused OSS tools, you can basically code them at the speed of thought with modern LLMs. The slow part is figuring out what you want to do in the first place, the implementing is basically instantaneous. It's literally faster than googling a tool that already does the job.

And yes, that doesn't scale to all problem domains or problem sizes, but in some areas even a 20x speedup would be a huge understatement.

I love this! I mean, (a) I feel I am 20x faster / better. I have not yet reached the stage where I can scientifically put a "x" on how much better I have become.

Am I getting more money>> I think I am currently putting the correct amount of seeds which hopefully will flourish in 2026 with results. But now, it is easier and faster.

But yes, I am sorry for claiming a more "felt like" number.

It could be ie 2x faster with 10x less staff/cost as well, right?

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