Ask HN: What single AI tool/technique 10x'd your productivity last year? As someone tinkering with AI agents daily, I’ve seen massive shifts since mid-2025. What’s the single AI tool, feature, or technique that gave you the biggest productivity leap in the last year? (Cursor Composer? Claude 4.5 projects? A custom RAG setup? Vibe-coding with o1?) |
Copilot also helps me transform into a fox and I have all kinds of KPI for that (e.g. got petted) but as-a-fox or otherwise I reject that there is anything 10x about it.
If you think you are 10x more productive coding before I implore you to look at it from the viewpoint of your team. I've been the guy who picks up projects that were "80% done" and had to do the last 80%. What gets me is the inconsistency, the times it does something better than I would do myself instantly vs the times I want it touch 2 files and it modified 35 and I can't tell what the hell it was thinking and frankly don't care.
Paste in ticket, get 95% of the way to the end.
I will add the caveat that this is only with the code. The overhead of communication has not improved at all beyond pasting code review comments into Claude to get replies.
What I really need is something to listen in at meetings for my name, summarize what was asked, and suggest an answer based on the codebase.
Made me so mad.
Tie that in with a release cycle that force restarts the IDE, its a recipe for flow-breaking frustration that makes a tool untrustable. When its untrustable, it gets removed.
Now I don't let my tools auto-update. It was an experiment to allow the auto-updates to begin with, because new tech paradigms, yet its clear the end user still isn't accounted for properly.
IMO because the product roadmap (such as it might ever be) is usually only influenced by poorly targeted analytics (more is not better), and a small minority of vocal users; leaving the rest of us in the lurch.