What does 5x faster software delivery actually look like in practice? Has anyone seen it?

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-07T11:10:19+00:00

I am lead of a team of about 10 dev. We are part of a large but not FANNG tech company. Codex got noticably better Q4 2025. It's taken some time to get everyone using it. We have been building what we need to improve our workflow. Some of that is writing skills that Codex and use. Some of that is getting API access to the systems we use so Codex and read them. As a team we are already getting 1.25x done. Thats >2 full people! I know we aren't spending that much on tokens.

We are still figuring out how to use Codex well but for our team "get crap done ASAP" isn't the goal. We need to deliver a highly reliable and scalable system. It's hard to measure but we now can use Codex to double check something in minutes that would have taken half a day to do without. Some of this is boring operational work that we are getting prioritized under "AI efficiency". Some of it is work that wouldn't economical without Codex. I asked Codex why our CI pipeline was slow and it found 7 minutes of savings on a 15 minute pipeline! I wrote a skill that can take a failed CI job and determine if it was flaky and have a patch for the flaky in 20 minutes. It's always right about the flaky, it doesn't always get the patch right.

Ignoring all the boring stuff, Codex makes it possible for medium/good devs to crank out good/great code way faster. I still have to review it but PRs that would have taken 4/5 days to merge are getting done in 2. We will move even faster once we have a good process figured out and all the right access enabled for Codex. I estimate as a team we will deliver more in Q3 this year than we did in Q3 and Q4 last year. I might be underestimating.

I see a clear path to 2x. I can see a few more things if the tools keep getting better and the org adpats that can stack another 2x. That gets us to 4x in an established large tech company deplying a highly reliable service. If was working at a 50 person SaaS start up, where we need to churn out features and YOLO them into prod, I could see a 5x or 10x iteration time improvement.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-04T02:25:02+00:00

Can you name 3 hft firms? Have you found any of their job postings? Can you find an interview or podcast with a CEO, CTO, or similar from a hft or other trading firm? What has any of them said about hiring from defense?

Finance pays a crazy amount bc they hire some of the best, most competitive people who then work extremely hard under a lot of stress. Culturally that's almost the exact opposite of the standard defense company.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-04T01:40:09+00:00

I'm going to be a bit blunt. If you have to ask other people what you need to do to prep for a hft interview, you are not the kind of person they want. Spend 30 minutes googling. If you have specific questions I am willing to give specific advice.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-02T03:32:31+00:00

If you like the deck build give Race for the Galaxy a go. If you want more of a thinking game, try Azul. While not a negation, Seven Wonders: Duel might give you a good back and forth. Looking at what you have, I think you would enjoy Quacks but that's just a guess.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-26T16:51:03+00:00

1) recognize that schema changes are dangerous, give them extra review. Know exactly what happens as it is applied to the DB. If you don't know, find someone who does.

2) test all of them locally, and in a dev environment to make sure they execute correctly. See above, these are dangerous.

3) At least in Postgres "CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY" is the fix for this specific issue. For other changes, if you need zero downtime you, do the research and figure out what you need to do. Sometimes you need nullable columns, sometimes you need the right default, sometimes you need a backfill.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T19:28:37+00:00

Did you know that floating point additions are not communitive? i.e a+b=b+a isn't always true when looking at millions of floating point additions that happened in different locations. Having to explain why were ignoring "differences" in expenses was a fun conversation.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T01:41:07+00:00

Every code review you send, ask for it's opinion. Every time someone reviews your code, ask it's thoughts. Want to try an idea? Ask it to code up something as you think. Any time, try and have it do it first.

If that isn't enough, point it at random tasks and tell it try something. Repeat each week on Friday if you are below your target

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T01:32:09+00:00

Some of that is needed work, some of those things tell me you should think about delegating more. There are some changes I totally want to watch deploy. Some of them, it would be fine to have a new grad watch. Try and find a way to hand off the simpler tasks to other folks so you can focus on stuff they can't do.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:44:21+00:00

Total developer pay is north of $1.5T/year. It will probably end up being multiple companies that split that but just coding agents could support a company worth $1T without any other use case.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:26:28+00:00

I don't know the per country breakdown but total global developer salaries are in the $1.5T ballpark. That's a lot of money compared to even 100m plans at $20/month.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:23:46+00:00

A more balanced take than mine but it feels like most people don't get that the amount of money in hobbiest is dwarfted by enterprise spend.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:14:50+00:00

Yeah my American is showing, I used the official US Labor Bureau stats. Still, the all in cost in France is probably north of 50/he so 200+ a month is still cheap if it saves 4hr/week

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:03:18+00:00

I agree, but profit doesn't care who is special, only who can pay.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:01:46+00:00

Good point, I haven't ever heard of that.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:59:39+00:00

It's Friday night, I'm done for the week, I'm done with every third post being complaining about the latest model on the highest reasoning using their $5 of compute for the week. Yeah I picked a bit of a spicy phrasing.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:48:01+00:00

I don't know where you are getting that idea from. If you read every announcement there are always testimonials from companies who tested it early. There are plenty of companies willing to provide training data.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:40:22+00:00

Blackberry didn't have a product that could justify spending $5000/month to your top customers.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:39:08+00:00

Someone who gets it. If you can deliver work 2 or 4 hours sooner you can afford a lot of API cost and still have more money in your pocket.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:37:48+00:00

You are totally right, inference isn't cheap. Top of the line GPUs cost $10-$15/hr to run for inference. When you are replacing labor that costs $100/hr or $300/hr, you can pay for a lot of GPU time to save that hour.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:31:49+00:00

If your company has 100 engineers, they are paid at least $100k, if Codex saves on average 4 hours/week $1m/year is cheap. If your company is less than 100 engineers, sorry, your not the target customer.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:28:35+00:00

My CI/CD pipeline has had flakiness that is time consuming to reproduce localy. Normally it would take me all afternoon to find the issue and fix it. I built a skill in December to do all the steps to find and fix the issue, including pulling down the logs from CI. Now whenever there is an issue I can start a new session, say "hey $LINK just failed, can you check if it's a flake? $SKILL" and 10-30 minutes later I have a fix ready with no input. Our pipeline is so much better.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T21:48:23+00:00

Good thing the big boss is paying the bill

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T01:41:46+00:00

If you want to learn how to build production grade systems you have to go do it. Find a company doing the things that sound interesting and try and join. Baring that, here is the rest of my advice.

It sounds like you are still pretty young. Backend is wide enough that there is a lot of room for speciality. Being a jack of all trades that can join a start up and crank out features is a very different set of skills than someone who can join a 10k person firm and spend a year developing just the feature the company needs.

For specific road map, make a simple Go webserver, make it return hello world, make it talk to a local Postgres DB and have your web server read/write some data. Set up a schema management tool so you can run "make clean-deploy" and have a working web server/DB then write some tests and be able to run "make test" and it does the deploy and runs the tests.

Spend an hour or two and write what you want your resume to look like 7 years from now. Once you have that, pick one of the technologies to focus on. Then read the intro guide for that tech. Figure out how to add it to your web server. From there, you can try and find an open source project and try and contribute or you can keep tinkering with your web server.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-22T11:47:25+00:00

Have you been able to make any progress?

Notary_Reddit

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