We have similar definition of streams, but It depends on a lot of things from your tooling/ language , stack etc.
if your builds take a fair bit of time (incremental builds may not work in worktree first time) or you are working on a item that has high latency feedback like e2e suite that runs on a actual browser etc.
Prompt styles also influences this. I like to make fairly detailed prompt that cover a lot of the nuances upfront and spend 10-15 or more writing it. I find that when I do that it takes longer, but I only give simple feedback during the run itself freeing me to go next item. Some people prefer chat style approach, you cannot keep lot of threads in mind if chatting.
Model and cli client choice matters , on average codex is slower than sonnet 4.5 . Within each family if you enable thinking or use the high reasoning model it can be slower as well.
Finally not all tasks are equal, I like to mix some complex and simpler ones or add some dev ex or a refactor that requires lower attention budget with features that require more.
Having said that, while I don’t know 10x type developers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are were such people and they can be truly that productive .
The analogy I think of is chess. Maybe I can play 2-3 games in parallel reasonably well, but there are professional players who can play dozens of games blindfolded and win all of them.
Nice answer - all of the above aligns with my experience.
I use sonnet a lot more than openai models and its speed means I do have to babysit it more and get chattier which does make a difference, probably you are right that if I was using codex which is on average 4-6 times slower than claude code that I would have more mental bandwidth to handle more workstreams.
if your builds take a fair bit of time (incremental builds may not work in worktree first time) or you are working on a item that has high latency feedback like e2e suite that runs on a actual browser etc.
Prompt styles also influences this. I like to make fairly detailed prompt that cover a lot of the nuances upfront and spend 10-15 or more writing it. I find that when I do that it takes longer, but I only give simple feedback during the run itself freeing me to go next item. Some people prefer chat style approach, you cannot keep lot of threads in mind if chatting.
Model and cli client choice matters , on average codex is slower than sonnet 4.5 . Within each family if you enable thinking or use the high reasoning model it can be slower as well.
Finally not all tasks are equal, I like to mix some complex and simpler ones or add some dev ex or a refactor that requires lower attention budget with features that require more.
Having said that, while I don’t know 10x type developers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are were such people and they can be truly that productive .
The analogy I think of is chess. Maybe I can play 2-3 games in parallel reasonably well, but there are professional players who can play dozens of games blindfolded and win all of them.