Not a 10x engineer

29 March 2026

I started building web software in the mid-1990s, back when "full stack" actually meant something. You understood the whole system, top to bottom. I wasn't a 10x engineer, but I was good, and I had enough context to move fast and ship things that worked.

Then, around 2007, the world shifted. Mobile arrived. Frameworks multiplied. Layers of abstraction piled up. Suddenly I wasn't just coding. I was handling architecture, product strategy, sales support, and people management. You cannot keep up with a hyper-evolving technology landscape when you are also doing everything else a business requires.

So you make trade-offs. You lean on what you know.

In 2012, I architected our flagship product as a WebForms VB.NET monolith. It wasn't fashionable, but I knew I could build it quickly and it would work. It did. We got traction, customers loved it, and we grew.

But behind the success, a silent divide was forming. The gap between what I could conceive and what I could confidently execute on my own had been widening for years.

That gap does not announce itself. It quietly grows. You still know what needs to be built. You still make the right calls. But there is an increasing distance between your vision and your hands, and you carry it.

When I first tried AI-assisted development seriously a year ago, the initial feeling was intrigue. That quickly turned into exasperation.

Less than a year later, that feeling has transformed into excitement.

The models are now good enough that I am no longer correcting them. I am pushing them.

Last week I built a natural language interface into my own financial data. I can ask plain English questions and get Claude-level reasoning over my actual numbers.

Ten years ago, the transformer architecture that powers this did not even exist in a research paper.

This project would once have meant a month deep in the implementation.

Instead it took one hour thinking through the design and one hour executing.

I may never have been a 10x engineer.

But now it feels like I have a team of them.