Every Engineer Will Be a 10x Engineer in 17 Months
I use LLMs to write code every single day—probably you do too. They're good, and getting better all the time, at writing elegant functions and pulling in external context. But with almost every project, as soon as I hand over control fully to the LLM (a.k.a. yolo mode), I quickly end up with a mess: duplicate code, false assumptions, placeholders for functions that don’t exist, essential features mysteriously removed. I feel like I’ve gone from being a 1x engineer to a 0.9x engineer.
No matter how many “rules” I set for my LLM—“always write tests,” “reuse existing functions,” “don’t be stupid”—it gradually gets bored of them and starts working around them. It’s like pair programming with a brilliant intern who has memory issues and a rebellious streak.
But I get it. If you told the best engineers I’ve ever worked with, “you can only look at 1% of the codebase,” and then asked them to build a new feature, they’d make a lot of the same mistakes. The problem isn’t intelligence. It’s vision. The biggest limitation right now is context windows. As soon as LLMs can see 80–100% of the codebase at once, it’ll be magic.
Claude 3.7 is already outperforming most engineers on narrow benchmarks. On HumanEval, it hits 92% accuracy—better than 96% of human devs in some coding competitions. But I don’t need it to be smarter than my best teammate. I need it to know what the hell we’ve already built.
Right now, Gemini 2.5 offers a 1-2 million token context window. Just a year ago, we were at 100K. Two years before that, we were stuck at 4K. At this rate (10× every ~12 months), we’ll cross 100M tokens in ~17 months—enough to fit some of the largest codebases on into a single prompt.
And when that happens, the LLM won’t just write clean functions. It’ll refactor systems, rewrite features across files, migrate patterns, remove dead code, and understand your product holistically.
At that point, you’re not getting frustrated with your rebellious intern. You’re leading a team of 10x-ers who see everything, forget nothing, and ships in seconds.
by marcus hyett