As a software engineer/developer, you learn pretty quickly that time is money!

If you code too slowly, then you blow the budget.

If you produce poor design or code, you’re setting the project up for failure.

To win, you have to code fast while keeping it high-quality and well-planned!

AI tools will 10x my productivity! Or will they?

No, not yet, they won’t. AI gives you an edge! It can help you write excellent code in no time!

And this is the promise sold by all the AI coding platforms!

However, you are still needed, and will be for a while yet. The key factor is still experience. A powerful platform can only take you so far, whether it’s AI-based or not. Your own experience still matters a great deal. Those without it may struggle, and for many, that challenge is part of the fun.

If things get too complicated, it might be time to reach out to someone like me who has the experience to help.

AI tools are amazing, offering bursts of productivity that can feel like they multiply your output by ten, but they work only in burst mode. Not exactly a true 10xer style.

This is also why you might start feeling frustrated, even when using tools that seem almost magical. You thought something would take a few days, but a few weeks later, you are still working on it.

It’s time to 10x Yourself, Not Your Coding!

Integrate AI into your entire pipeline so you can act as the quality checkpoint instead of doing all the manual work.

If you really want to become a 10xer, then you need to change more than just the coding tools you use. You need to optimise much more than that, and out-of-the-box tools can’t help you with it (yet).

The problem isn’t the AI tools you have available to you - they are delivering exactly what they promised they would.

The problem is you!

You need to optimise yourself, and up until now, you have had very limited options, and, truth be told, none of them have been really up to the task!

Before AI, my goal was to complete 12 to 15 real tasks per day. Some tasks should have taken 30 minutes, but ended up taking a very annoying 3 hours! But overall, based on my experience, I would mostly expect to hit 12 to 15 tasks a day!

Now we have AI, I’m aiming to complete many more than this, but it isn’t linear because I still only have one brain and one pair of hands!

The answer is to take more from the AI capability set by writing tools for yourself (as a person) and for your productivity workflows.

Connectivity saves the day!

Your time is the issue. So you need to be very careful how you spend it.

Create tools for yourself that do the work on your behalf using APIs, MCP servers, Agent Skills, code execution sandboxes, agent SDKs, and anything else that lets you connect things together, extract data, and build AI-optimised workflows to get the job done.

For example, your customers submit tasks to a project management tool. Using the tool API, you can write a simple Streamlit app that pulls information out of the tool and prepares it for the next step.

Imagine you have 50 tasks waiting for you. Instead of looking at each one, you get AI to review them and to suggest the next steps.

It can signal to you those that it knows what to do with. It can write a plan, review the plan and prepare them so they are ready to go.

Some will need your attention. It will create the questions and update them accordingly based on your answers.

Your job becomes more of a quality checkpoint, either granting permission to move forward or supplying the necessary information before progress can continue.

Injecting this back into your development workflow allows you to carry on as normal.

So, what’s happened here? We now have a highly optimised, repeatable process for handling feature changes, suggestions, bugs, improvements, and anything else your team and customers throw at you, all via this project management tool.

Yes, you end up paying for tokens needed to do this work, but it saves you a ton of time.

This is just one example. The next step is to integrate this with your AI coding method of choice, such as Claude Code, and you will see real, measurable results.

What Next?

The ball’s in your court. I’m creating a variety of tools to optimise my time, and they go far beyond just coding while remaining cheap to operate. My aim is to consistently achieve a tenfold improvement across all my work activities.

You can do the same. It doesn’t even matter if you are a coder or not. You look for what is taking up your time and then look at heavily optimising it.

If you’re not sure where to start, try creating your own time tracker. You could send yourself a text message every 30 minutes between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., use text-to-speech for a quick update, and then log the results. After a few weeks, review the data to see what it reveals. Using just SMS messages to keep things simple (no app needed!)

If you’d rather not build something yourself, you can always use products like RescueTime (I’ve been using it for years, and it’s fantastic!).

Maybe I should create a simple mobile app that offers suggestions for how people can optimise themselves using AI tools and techniques for everyday situations.