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Comment by richard_chase | Hacker News Reader

We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life.

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>"We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life."

There was a sweet spot in mid-2025 where this was actually the case; Claude Code early adopters could complete sprint work in their sleep while the rest of the world (management) hadn't caught on yet.

Now it's just "oh, this should take you guys a day, right?"

Tbf it still is the norm in many other companies but… shhhhh

Now you spend all day in meetings getting alignment, and a half hour prompting Claude to let it rip.

Kinda sad that LLM's let me build little projects that would take a week in an hour, yet Google still isn't releasing much new or different, or even fixing bugs faster.

Mr boss man needs to uncork Google's 'labs' culture.

They simply aren't as useful for production stuff as they are for little projects.

They are useful! Just not the 1000x return you get on a tiny thing or the 100x return you get on a small thing.

I completely disagree. If you do the architecture and review the work, they can do bulletproof production work.

I have them review each other’s work before I review it, and they also do security audits of the entire codebase on a regular schedule.

For frontend work especially, the productivity boost is insane. Claude built me a replacement for a complex UI that took a human developer 6 months to build poorly, and Claude did it in two hours.

Production was probably the wrong word - I really mean size and complexity of the project.

A replacement for a complex UI that would take a human developer 6 months to do is indeed something I would consider a small project at this point.

6 man-months is a tiny project by standards of companies like Google.

I was responding to a claim about production quality, not about project size

I did misspeak by saying production, but the context was google products and I mentioned size thrice.

> For frontend work especially, the productivity boost is insane. Claude built me a replacement for a complex UI that took a human developer 6 months to build poorly, and Claude did it in two hours.

It sounds incredible if the UI already existed in some shape, and it took a developer 6 months. With Qtcreator one could build UI full UI in 2 days if the wireframes or a UI already exists.

This was a web UI, which is much more complex than a desktop UI because of legacy browsers and idiosyncrasies

> if you spend x2 the effort on the very hard stuff you can now do the very easy part kinda faster

Gee thanks, AI dude.

Are you qualified to judge in all those areas? I too look at websites Claude builds in amazement but I'm sure that's a lot of crap underneath.

I’ve been building websites for 30 years and have been architect- or CTO-level at web startups for 15 years. I’ve done all of this painstakingly myself many, many times. I know whether Claude is good at it or not.

How long do you think that is going to last?

yeah every single time I hear someone brag about fully automating their job I wonder, "what do they need you for, then?"

Are you hiring Java developers right now, haha...

Funny comment. Yes you are indeed qualified to write "in Java" in the prompt.

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