It's that you can work as a solo developer at the abstraction level of a small startup company
Benjammer on Hacker News
generate code in a few minutes that would take 2-6 weeks to write myself
In the thread “A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code”, replying to this comment
Helped: Precise prompt wording and planning to guide the LLM to good plans.
Got in the way: Results are often sloppy with weird AI quirks requiring cleanup.
… well for good results, and yes the results are often sloppy in some parts and have weird quirks that no human engineer would make on purpose, but if you stick to working on prompt/context engineering and getting better and faster at the above process, the key unlock is not that it just does the same coding for you, with it generating the code instead. It's that you can work as a solo developer at the abstraction level of a small startup company. I can design and implement an enterprise grade SSO auth system over a weekend that integrates with Okta and passes security testing. …