What 10x actually looks like

131 tasks. That’s what my text file says I handed to an agent in the week of 5 to 11 October, across 46 sessions, at work and at home. For comparison, the whole of last year was 734, over about ten months, which is roughly 17 a week. So by the crudest measure, tasks per week went up about eight times in a year.

I’ve been saying “about 10x” when people ask how much more I get done, and a friend asked me last month how I’d measured that. I hadn’t. So I went through one ordinary week, line by line.

The text file has the same columns it’s had since February last year, plus a couple I’ve added: what the task was, work or personal, how it ended, and whether it ran alongside other sessions. Of the 131, I accepted 101 with at most small edits, which is 77%, up from 71% for last year. I sent 18 back for real rework, and I gave up on 12. 74 were work tasks and 57 were personal. Most of the week I had two or three sessions going at once, in panes in my terminal, and one of the three was usually something long and unattended.

Where it’s 10x, or more

The personal column is where the big number comes from, and it’s a bit of a cheat. On Saturday an agent and I spent the afternoon on my Neovim config: Mermaid diagrams in Markdown files now render as images inline, and the TypeScript language server moved from a global npm install to the editor’s own package manager. A couple of weeks before that, an evening went on finding out that an agent harness I’d installed and never actually used had put its own copy of Node ahead of mine on the path, so for about three weeks everything that asked for node, including my editor, had been running someone else’s. The agent wrote a little loop that checks which binary each running process really has open, which is not something I’d have known how to write from memory, and it found the stragglers.

Neither of those would have taken me ten times as long by hand. They’d have taken forever, because I wouldn’t have done them. That’s most of the personal column: small, bespoke tools and fixes that were never worth a weekend, so they never happened, and now they’re worth an hour. I built four of those last week, including the script that produced the counts in this post. I can’t put a multiplier on something that used to be zero, and that’s where the 10x feeling comes from.

Where it’s closer to 2x

Work is different. I merged 17 PRs of my own that week. Before agents, in a week where I had time to write code at all, I’d have merged two or three. That looks like 6x, but my PRs are smaller now, like everyone’s on the team since we halved the size guideline last year, and a good chunk of them are upgrades and test work that I wouldn’t have done myself before; I’d have asked someone else. Measured as changes that matter, I’d put it at two or three times what I used to manage.

The limit is the same one I wrote about last year. Everything I merged, I read. My time log for the week says I spent about 21 hours reading diffs and writing specs, and maybe five typing anything that wasn’t English. Review is still the constraint on me, and on the team, and three panes is about where I stop reading properly, so it isn’t going to get much faster by adding agents.

Where it’s 1x

Most of my job isn’t code, and none of that changed. I had nine one-on-ones that week, two interviews, a planning meeting about next year’s budget, and a long conversation with our CS lead about the cron job incident. I use an agent to argue with my design docs, but deciding which argument matters takes the same time it always did. If I count all my working hours, not just the coding ones, the honest multiplier on my output at work is well under 2x.

The one I wrote by hand

One of the 17 PRs I wrote myself, a nine-line change to a retry policy in one of our C# services, because it was faster than explaining it. It was the most enjoyable twenty minutes of my week. I’ve been programming since I was 13, and for most of that time the typing was the part I liked, the Turbo C and the TSRs and, later, the long evenings in Visual Studio. I barely do it now. I get far more done, and I’m a little sad about it.

So is it 10x? If I add up everything that got built that week, the work and the personal things together, and compare it with a week from three years ago, I think it’s about there, and the task count says the same. It’s just very unevenly spread. Almost all of it is in things that used to not happen at all, and the part of my week that’s meetings and judgment hasn’t moved. I’ll keep saying ten times, with that footnote attached.