TL;DR
Taking the time to figure out what has value beyond this specific task and feeding it back into your setup is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.
1. The Promise and the Gap
Everyone's chasing the x10 developer these days. AI can make you ten times more productive, they say. Ship ten times faster. Do the work of a team.
When I started using AI for coding, the obvious move was to go faster: wire the best LLM to the codebase, give it a task suitable in size and complexity, and watch it change the code faster than I can keep track of. That didn't work. The model would produce things that looked right but I'd spend more time correcting and retracing than it would have taken me to build it myself. Every 6 months a new model or tool would come out that made things better, but nothing that really closes the gap. I think I got to x1.25, maybe.
