Honest question: how much time are you saving versus ignoring that all of this exists and instead just jumping right in and coding yourself?
I understood there were still people asking this 12 months ago. But still?
You could only possibly be doubting the time savings if you simply haven't used agentic development, whether Claude Code or other.
You have to understand, by now you basically sound like someone asking how much time you could be saving by writing in Python, instead of just jumping right in and coding assembly yourself.
If you're still asking the question, you just need to bite the bullet and try it.
I've used Claude Code. It produces no time savings.
If you post something like that, all it says is that you're either trolling or don't know what you're doing.
There are some very specific areas where it might not help, just the same as there are times where writing assembly is still better.
So what exactly is your motivation in saying "It produces no time savings"? Something so obviously false? I just don't get it.
If it's the kind of thing that requires a lot of iterative back-and-forth, like tweaking UX design, then there may be little speedup.
If it's the kind of thing where you there is a clear pass/fail, e.g. writing software to satisfy a comprehensive test suite that is black and white, then it could be 1000x.
The better-defined the task is and the more the agent can evaluate its own success, the bigger the multiplier.
Also, obviously, the more you are working in an area that is more unfamiliar to yourself, the bigger the multiplier.
That's why one morning I'll feel like it's maybe just 2x as it's constantly testing an app in an iOS simulator to see if a UX bug got fixed. That afternoon it might be 10x as it works on some pure code fixes that I still need to verify manually if they work. The next morning it might be something like 200x as I have an incredibly well-defined task that requires a lot of algorithmic research and 10,000 lines of code, but where the end result is easily provably correct or not. That afternoon it could be essentially "inifinity X" as it fixes a problem in a programming language I'm not even familiar with, in a domain it would take me months to get up-to-speed on, in a library I don't know, which solves a bug that is blocking me. Because it's just not something I could have realistically done at all.
So it's incredibly task-dependent. But it's pretty much always faster to some degree. Sometimes a little, sometimes a whole lot, sometimes so much faster it's still a little hard to believe.
I caught myself recently explaining something like "resize the top element 30% and move the bottom element up 10%" (except it was slightly more complex).
After a few iterations of that I thought "what are we doing here? I could adjust a single value in the CSS instead of writing complete sentences!". The problem was, then I'd have to go dig up the values and see how it was laid out, which might take more time then writing the sentences. Its still crazy though.
On the other hand, the basic layout was done in 2 minutes instead of half a day so there was that.
But if you’re working with a designer and you’re trying to get the agent to get every little thing pixel perfect, they are still complete ass at image understanding at that level. But they can get the broad strokes generally correct.
For the generic / average developer pushing SaaS features out on their company's webapp how much faster is it, really?
For the generic average dev pushing SaaS features, it's way faster. For the kind of stuff where the coding is essentially all boilerplate/connector, something like Claude shines. Because there's already a pattern for everything in the codebase.
If you are able to parallelize your work, e.g. work on 2 or 3 features at a time, your coding time goes down to essentially zero, or rather the time it takes you to write the prompts (hint: use dictation if you're working from home), and all your work is now spent on all the same design and manual testing you were doing before. So depending on what proportion of your time was spent on design/testing vs. writing actual code before, your generic/average dev can see a productivity boost of anywhere from 2x to 20x. It really just depends on what proportion of their job they actually spend literally writing code.
And FWIW, I'm not arguing against a productivity boost. I've tried the tools. But for me, it was nowhere near 10x, especially when working through a brand new feature or module. Maybe 2x, 3x? Though even that seems generous in some cases. And you give up a lot to get that boost with changing the way you work.
Agreed it's higher and probably closer to a 5x-10x for some boilerplate copy/paste duplication or extension of an already existing feature.