I've heard this said so many times, but my experience has just been so dramatically the opposite that it rings false. But geohot seems to be a pretty productive and smart guy, so it's hard to just dismiss what he's saying.

I get the sense that he's truly one of the 10x engineers. And maybe he can do it faster and better manually. But for those of us who aren't 10x, I think it lets us bridge that gap. Now we're getting back to "status anxiety": is this an attack on his ego, if the average becomes 10x?

Anecdote: Over 2 weeks of spare time, I used AI tooling to build a fairly sophisticated debian package caching proxy server (~72KLOC, 27K implementation, 45K tests). This would have easily taken me 6 months of focused time to implement by hand. I literally couldn't have done it because I can't take that much time off work and I have other weekend/evening obligations.