Nobody's taken me up on this offer yet. [0]
[0] >>46325469
E.g. I have an aws agent that does all my devops for me. It isn’t doing anything insane but when I need to investigate something or make a terraform change, I send it off and go do something else. I do similar things 20-100 times a day now. Go write this script, do this report, update this documentation, etc.
I think if you are a high level swe it takes a lot of effort to get “better than doing it myself”. If you have a more generalist role, AI is easily a 10x productivity booster if you are knowledgeable about using it.
I'd happily demonstrate this kind of workflow on my day job if not for company trade-secrets.
That's as legacy as it gets, 20+ year old code base with several "strata" of different technologies and approaches.
Claude Opus handily navigates around it, and produces working bug fixes with minimal guidance.
I'm not going to claim it's 20x or 50x yet, there's still navigation and babysitting involved, but it's definitely capable of working on complex problems, I just don't trust it to run it in YOLO mode.
The key thing is, you need domain knowledge. You need to know where to correct it, and which direction to point it in.
It's not magic, and it will have bad ideas. The key picking out the good ideas from the bad.
It's hard to tell where this 20-50x increase is.
You mentioned "navigation and babysitting", could you share what that looks like in practice? Do you have to spend time reconstructing context or correcting Claude's misunderstandings? Do you still need to interrupt colleagues for some tacit knowledge, or has that changed?