My 5x number is because I can do roughly as much work as I used to do in a week in a day, if I hold the quality bar steady. In reality, I wouldn’t normally end up being able to do that, and would trade off quality for speed to impact and just live with tech debt to be paid down later. With Claude, I essentially never accumulate tech debt (other than the kind of debt that creeps up because I don’t notice it) and actively pay it down with each PR.
In terms of deliverables, though, it’s as I say more like a 1.5x improvement. The real productivity gains are coming from putting more effort into quality than I’d otherwise get permission to.
(Of course, I could just be wrong because I don’t have great ways to measure counterfactual code quality.)
Do you track your subjective experience of tech debt, please? If I stop by in 1 year’s time and ask for your measurements of tech debt accumulated since now till then compared to previous years, you will be able to tell me whether you still feel the improvement? Or you don’t have any data about previous years and have not started to measure any notes or other metrics about the improved tech debt feelings either? Or something else?
I’m not keeping a quantified record, if that’s what you mean, but yes I have a strong sense of how much debt there is in the code base and how it’s been trending.
Yeah it occurs to me reading this that, while I have used AI to code easy things faster, and sometimes code “hard things” at all (sometimes learning along the way), I haven’t used it to specifically try to “code kinda normally while reducing more tech debt along the way.” Will think on that.
My 5x number is because I can do roughly as much work as I used to do in a week in a day, if I hold the quality bar steady. In reality, I wouldn’t normally end up being able to do that, and would trade off quality for speed to impact and just live with tech debt to be paid down later. With Claude, I essentially never accumulate tech debt (other than the kind of debt that creeps up because I don’t notice it) and actively pay it down with each PR.
In terms of deliverables, though, it’s as I say more like a 1.5x improvement. The real productivity gains are coming from putting more effort into quality than I’d otherwise get permission to.
(Of course, I could just be wrong because I don’t have great ways to measure counterfactual code quality.)
Do you track your subjective experience of tech debt, please? If I stop by in 1 year’s time and ask for your measurements of tech debt accumulated since now till then compared to previous years, you will be able to tell me whether you still feel the improvement? Or you don’t have any data about previous years and have not started to measure any notes or other metrics about the improved tech debt feelings either? Or something else?
I’m not keeping a quantified record, if that’s what you mean, but yes I have a strong sense of how much debt there is in the code base and how it’s been trending.
Yeah it occurs to me reading this that, while I have used AI to code easy things faster, and sometimes code “hard things” at all (sometimes learning along the way), I haven’t used it to specifically try to “code kinda normally while reducing more tech debt along the way.” Will think on that.