Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
Over the last year or so, my development speed relative to my own baseline from ~2019 is easily 20x, sometimes more. Not because I type faster, or because I cut corners, but because I changed how I use AI.
The short version: I don’t use AI inside my editor. I use two AIs in parallel, in the browser, with full context.
Here’s the setup.
I keep two tabs open:
One AI that acts as a “builder”. It gets a lot of context and does the heavy lifting.
One AI that acts as a reviewer. It only sees diffs and tries to find mistakes.
That’s it. No plugins, no special tooling. Just browser tabs and a terminal.
The important part is context. Instead of asking for snippets, I paste entire files or modules and explain the goal. I ask the AI to explain the approach first, including tradeoffs, before it writes code. That forces me to stay in control of architecture instead of accepting a blob I don’t understand.
A typical flow looks like this:
1. Paste several related files (often across languages).
2. Describe the change I want and ask for an explanation of options. Read and summarize concepts, wikipedia, etc.
3. Pick an approach. Have extensive conversations about trade-offs, concepts, adversarial security etc. Find ways to do things that the OS allows.
4. Let the AI implement it across all files.
5. Copy the diff into the second AI and ask it to look for regressions, missing arguments, or subtle breakage.
6. Fix whatever it finds.
Ship.
The second AI catches a lot of things I would otherwise miss when moving fast. Things like “you changed this call signature but didn’t update one caller” or “this default value subtly changed behavior”.
What surprised me is how much faster cross-stack work gets. Stuff that used to stall because it crossed boundaries (Swift → Obj-C → JS, or backend → frontend) becomes straightforward because the AI can reason across all of it at once.
I’m intentionally strict about “surgical edits”. I don’t let the AI rewrite files unless that’s explicitly the task. I ask for exact lines to add or change. That keeps diffs small and reviewable.
This is very different from autocomplete-style tools. Those are great for local edits, but they still keep you as the integrator across files. This approach flips that: you stay the architect and reviewer, the AI does the integration work, and a second AI sanity-checks it.
Costs me about $40/month total. The real cost is discipline: always providing context, always reviewing diffs, and never pasting code you don’t understand.
I’m sharing this because it’s been a genuine step-change for me, not a gimmick. Happy to answer questions about limits, failure modes, or where this breaks down.
Here is a wiki-type overview I put together for our developers on our team: https://community.intercoin.app/t/ai-assisted-development-playbook-how-we-ship-faster-without-breaking-things/2950
37 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadCitation: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6188624
To be fair, most web/mobile frameworks expect you to do that.
Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.
I might start using a second LLM to review the diffs. Something like Gemini 3 Fast. Sounds good.
But I don't want to give up on a fancy IDE to use browser tabs.
So I think I will ask the second LLM to review the `git diff`.
It has lots of potential. Let me, though, have my own... doubts about it. Thanks for sharing anyway.
Use my abstract factory factories and inversion of control containers. With Haskell your entire solution is just a 20-line mapreduce in a monad transformer stack over IO. In J, it's 20 characters.
I don't see how AI differs. Rather, the last study of significance found that devs were gaslighting themselves into believing they were more productive, when the data actually bore the opposite conclusion [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
Do you ship 20x more PRs ? Did you solve 20x more bugs ? Did you add 20x more features ? Did you provide 20x more ARR, more values, etc...
I have passed through a phase of copy/pasting from the ChatGPT web to autocomplete tools, but the real feeling of "shit, this is going to really change how I code" came with Claude Code.
I really appreciate that he is up-front about "Yes. Vibe coding has lots of dangerous problems that you must learn to control if you are to go whole-hog like this."
Has anyone read his Vibe Coding book? The Amazon reviews make it sound like it's heavy on inspiration but light on techniques.
So, it would take roughly two months to complete a project at the scale of SQLite or TeX.
I try to think of what this would look like at my company and I can't even really conceive of what this dream scenario is supposed to be. We have maybe 6-10 legitimately revenue-earning products with a meaningful user base and it took about a decade to get there. There is no reasonable world in which you say we could have done that in 10 weeks instead, which would be roughly 1/50th the time. It takes at least that long typically just to get a contract completed once a prospective customer decides they even want to make a purchase. Writing code faster won't speed that process up. Can we push features 50x faster? No, we can't, because they come as a response to feature requests from users, which means we need to wait to have users who make such requests, and you can't just compress 10 years of that happening into 10 weeks. That's to say nothing of the fact that what we work on now is a response to market and ecosystem conditions now, not conditions as they were 10 years ago. If we'd pushed what we were doing now to having done it then instead, we'd have just been working on the wrong things.
Think about what it would mean to produce cars 50x faster than using current processes. What good would that even do? The current processes already produce all the cars the world needs. Making them 50x faster wouldn't give you a larger customer base. You'd just be making things no one needs and then throwing them away. The only sensible version of this is doing the same thing at roughly the same speed but at 1/50th the cost. I don't doubt that faster code generation can cut cost but not to 1/50th. Too much of the cost in creating and running a company has nothing at all to do with output.
Show us the financial statements from your company you started in 2019 and your company today. I would be absolutely thrilled to see somebody concretely show they earn the same revenue for 1/50the the cost, or 50x revenue for the same cost. The fact that you push 50x the number of commits or lines of code to Github means nothing to me.
That said... I jumped to a few random moments in your video and had an "oh my god" reaction because you really were not kidding when you said that you were pasting code.
I'm pretty much begging you to install and use Cursor. Whatever boost you're getting from your current workflow, you will see triple through use of their Agent/Plan/Debug modes, especially when using Opus 4.5. I promise you: it's a before electricity vs after electricity scenario. I'm actually excited for you.
A lot of folks will tell you to use Claude Code. I personally find that it doesn't make sense for the sorts of projects I work on; I would 100% start with Cursor either way.