プログラマ道¹.

Companion piece to the 100x post. That one was the framing argument: AI tooling is +0.99 with a wielding bonus, not a multiplier. This is the ground-level version. How I actually drive the thing day to day, what I will not delegate, and why none of this is new.

I drive Claude every day. Across Woosmap services in Python, a music app in Go and SwiftUI on the weekends (Tunes), a SNES toolchain in Python (a816, xdds), and a fair amount of 65c816 ROM hacking. The tool is real. It does not flip the table on the discipline an engineer needs. It raises the floor a notch and rewards the wielder. What the wielder is actually doing, when it works, is the part nobody writes down.

The 100x engineer is back in the discourse. This time the pitch is that an engineer with the right AI tooling can do the work of a hundred. Sometimes the number is 10x, sometimes it is 100x, occasionally someone goes wild and writes 1000x. The number is always round and the unit is always missing.

What are we counting?

If a 100x engineer using Claude can do 365 days of work in 3.65 days, whose 365 days? A staff engineer shipping platform infrastructure? A junior wiring up CRUD endpoints? My grandmother on a good day? The denominator is doing all the work in that sentence and nobody ever writes it down.

My iPod 5.5g is old enough to drink alcohol in any country that has a drinking age. I bought it used, swapped the battery and the disk for an SD card mod, and it still does the one thing it was sold to do: play music. No firmware update has ever taken a feature away. No company has decided the device is too old to deserve syncing. Apple, to their credit, still ships iTunes and Music with iPod sync on macOS. But even the day they stop, the iPod will keep playing whatever is already on the disk. The original purpose has not eroded.