That is actually reassuring. I used to try to work this way with people but the culture where I work didn’t align and I found it easier to work this way alone by trying to put myself into critique mode and so on. Now much better to get AIs to do it. And I find the more I polish the plan the less expensive the AI needed to implement too.

Developer of 20+ years here, can't give you an accurate multiplier but I am faster.

Because spotting holes in specs has never been one of my strengths. And working without technical colleagues much of the time, it's a boon to be able to "rubber-duck" my ideas with something that is at least more intelligent than plastic.

Grabbing multipliers from thin air, the coding bit may only be 2x faster with a poorer-quality outcome, but working out what's needed is a good 5x faster.

And yes, I'm using the same adversarial AI MO as @wood_spirit, combined with Matt Pocock's excellent /grill-me and /grill-with-docs skills [1] and Plannotator [2] to review the plans.

1. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

2. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

Can't speak for GP or OP, but I see about 10x the output and 2-4x the value of what I would be able to get by hand. Within the gap between 2-4x and the 10x is really a lot of design documents, user/dev documentation and testing that I might not have rolled to nearly the extent that I do/get when using AI.

I haven't been using multiple AIs adversarially as OP, but might consider giving it a try with Codex and Opus. That said, my AI workflow has been pretty similar... lots of iterations on just design, then iterations on documentation, testing, etc... then iterations on implementation, testing, validation and human review in the mix.

My analogy is that it's really close to working with a foreign dev team, but your turnaround is in minutes instead of days, where it's much more interactive.

For me, sometimes faster/sometimes slower, but there are a lot of other benefits besides speed:

* I can work in code I'm not familiar with much easier

* LLMs often identify confusion or uncertainty upfront, so I can address it earlier.

* I'm much less mentally taxed so I can go for longer at my top end.

* Meetings, disruptions, end of day is WAY less critical since I can lean on the LLM to get back into things.

* I can do something else productive while the LLM is running. Bug fixes, documentation, PR reviews, etc.

Having tried something similar, the perceived speedup does not, in the steady state, last.

To get a quality, lasting, result you're ultimately having to carefully study everything otherwise you end up quickly accumulating cognitive debt and the speedup soon shrinks as you're constantly having to revisit the initial approaches.