26x

I’ve started telling people that I am working at 26x speed. It sounds like hyperbole, which is sort of deliberate. But it’s not. Since the beginning of the year, I have done six months of work – of coding – every week.

Working with AI agents, and especially Claude Code, has changed my entire coding life.

I’ve always been driven to build, and describe myself as a builder on my personal page, but I’ve often become frustrated with how long it takes to do the things required to build something great. Even a simple CRUD app takes a decent amount of footwork. Add an item. Delete an item. Edit an item. Add validation. Build relationships between items. That’s hours of work.

I would get bored implementing all of the basic states. It would run my battery down, even as I pushed through. The incremental dopamine hits of a function working as I hoped were sometimes enough – but there came a point where I just couldn’t do any more for the day. And I consider myself to be pretty persistent.

5x–10x

Then came the first “good” versions of LLM code writing. Cursor. It would autocomplete, correctly, what I wanted to do more often than not. I started chatting and asking it to build out features, iterating back and forth until we got to where we wanted to be.

By the middle of last year I had become the coder I wanted to be. The tooling had made it possible for me to complete around a week of 2024 work in a day – albeit with the caveat that most of my time was spent checking the work, with occasional bouts of huge frustration as the LLM did something completely inane.

Codex was a game changer. Moving to Codex from Cursor meant that I could finally level up to being a 10x coder. Two weeks of work in a day. We need a micro app to solve a very specific internal problem? No worries, just give me a day.

My output was high, but I still sank a lot of my time into making sure that the code was right and really tweaking designs. It was great, but it wasn’t great.

And then came Claude

I had used Claude Code a little previously but had stuck to the OpenAI ecosystem – the tools were pretty comparable. Until an update in December, when everything changed. I saw murmurings on X and decided to play a little over the Christmas break. It was an entire reality shift.

Spec out what you want built, and it would build it. End to end. No laziness. Correct integrations. It would actually go and get the documentation I asked it to. It removed all of the effort involved in building an app.

Ideas that have sat on the shelf for years are built and live. In the course of a month I have done more than I could have done in well over a year. It has blown my mind. My problems are no longer code related. They are all actual business problems.

This year I will produce more code – more features – than I could have been expected to in my entire career just five years ago. Which is just… wild.>