How much can AI actually speed up your coding?

Once you master using coding agents effectively, and become adept at the current state-of-the-art tooling and techniques, how much speedup in your development speed can you realistically expect?

The short answer:

For most people, 2X.

That seems to be the most common result right now among professionals who are doing it right, and factoring in everything in the long run.

Not long ago, I remember seeing many folks claim that coding agents were making them 10X more productive.

That just didn't make sense to me; it was nowhere what I was seeing anyone get, when I could actually verify what they were producing, in terms of production output.

What I think happened is that certain steps of the process were indeed made that much faster - literally 10X.

That does not mean you get 10 years of development work in 1 year; it just means one slice was dramatically faster. But I think when people did experience those 10X events, it stuck in their minds so much, they at first over-extrapolated.

At this point, I have noticed those 10X claims are not being made so often.

Too many of them just didn't stand up to scrutiny. In some cases, it turned out to be a stunt that doesn't translate to what most of us are doing day-to-day. And the over-extrapolaters with honest intentions got wiser, and realized they had not been fully accounting for everything.

Even this 2X isn't guaranteed. I actually think about 30%, or 1.3x, is more typical; and there are many cases where it's clear that AI ended up slowing the whole team down considerably.

Again, I'm looking at the OVERALL speedup. Not what you experience in one exciting afternoon, when the AI happens to work great. But looking at your total productive output over a time span of months or more.

And what does it take to reach that 2X threshold?

A mix of things, really. Which you learn in the Boosted Code curriculum.

See what you get here;