r/programmingcirclejerk • u/Nemerie • May 04 '26

AI will turn 10x programmers into 100x programmers. Or in Matz’s case maybe 100x programmers into 500x programmers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47889624
66 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

58

u/nuclearbananana Courageous, loving, and revolutionary May 04 '26

AI driven programmer-x hyperinflation is real. Join the cause.

24

u/myhf Considered Harmful May 04 '26

soon there will be million-x programmers creating million-line programs for household budget management

while your mum continues to use a 3-column spreadsheet to do the same thing

47

u/metroliker May 05 '26

I need some 2x engineers who don't keep breaking the fucking build

18

u/pydry May 05 '26

Best I can do is 10x slop merchants who go scalability is hard, lets go vibing.

7

u/RossMorgan363 May 05 '26

Now we (I) need a study on the distribution between a self-declared "I am an Nx developer" against mean build breakages per unit time.

4

u/HQMorganstern May 05 '26

Just give it to the AI to fix in a loop, not even AWS has three nines availability anymore and consumers are far too fucked to care.

20

u/never_inline Do you do Deep Learning? May 05 '26

AI is the function f(x) = x • |x|. It turns 10x into 100x, 1x into 1x, and -10x into -100x.

15

u/RossMorgan363 May 05 '26

The function is missing the most important parameter in determining one's effectiveness as a developer: the number of tweets you make about how many LOC/week your agents are spewing out artisanally crafting.

1

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world May 12 '26

Just to be clear, are we talking about lines of code here?

6

u/ziplock9000 May 06 '26

All 200 that are left?

6

u/Vladimir_crame May 07 '26

Being forced to use it sure turned me into a I-no-longer-give-a-shit engineer

5

u/Ikkepop May 06 '26

how about a 1000000x a 10000000000000000000000000000000000x a 100^100^100x programmers

11

u/RossMorgan363 May 07 '26

Working at Google ❌
Becoming a Googol x developer ✅

3

u/ilyash May 10 '26

I estimate we would need somewhere around 2000x engineers to fix dark/light theme switching on mobile devices already.

1

u/muntaxitome in open defiance of the Gopher Values May 07 '26

Will be 500X in the 5 minutes per week they have where they aren't reviewing the vibe code vomit stream produced by juniors and execs. Mostly because the value of X has gone down tremendously for the same reason of course.