if someone — whether it’s your CEO, your tech lead, or some Reddit dork — claims they’re now a 10xer because of AI, that’s almost assuredly untrue, demand they show receipts or shut the f— up.

I actually had this thought recently, that the vibecoder is the new 10xer, but in the derogatory sense of your company’s cowboy coder whipping up beautiful messes for everyone else to drown in.

Note also that genuine labor saving stuff like say the Unity engine with Unity asset store, did result in an absolute flood of shovelware on Steam back in the mid 2010s (although that probably had as much having to do with Steam FOMO-ing about the possibility of not letting the next Minecraft onto Steam).

As a thought experiment imagine an unreliable labor saving tool that speeds up half* of the work 20x, and slows down the other half 3x. You would end up 1.525 times slower.

The fraction of work (not by lines but by hours) that AI helps with is probably less than 50% , and the speed up is probably worse than 20x.

Slowdown could be due to some combination of

• Trying to do it with AI until you sink too much time into that and then doing it yourself (>2x slowdown here).
• Being slower at working with the code you didn’t write.
• It being much harder to debug code you didn’t write.
• Plagiarism being inferior to using open source libraries.

footnote: “half” as measured by the pre-tool hours.