> Teams using Claude for everyday PRs are merging 40-50 a week instead of 10

How is this even possible? Am I the only SWE who feels like the easiest part of my job is writing code and this was never the main bottleneck to PR?

Before CC I'd probably spent around 20-30% of my day just writing code into an IE. That's now maybe 10% now. I'd probably also spend 20-30% of my day reading code and investigating issues, which is now maybe 10-15% of my day now using CC to help with investigation and explanations.

But there's a huge part of my day, perhaps the majority it, where I'm just thinking about technical requirements, trying to figure out the right data model & right architecture given those requirements, thinking about the UX, attending meetings, code reviews, QA, etc, etc, etc...

Are these people who are spitting out code literally doing nothing but writing code all day without any thought so now they're seeing 4-5x boosts in output?

For me it's probably made me 50% more efficient in about 40-50% of my work. So I'm probably only like 20-25% more efficient overall. And this assumes that the code I'm getting CC to produce is even comparable to my own, which in my experience it's not without significant effort which just erodes any productivity benefit from the production of code.

If your developers are raising 5x more PRs something is seriously wrong. I suspect that's only possible if they're not thinking through things and just getting CC to decide the requirements, come up with the architecture, decide on implementation details, write the code and test it. Presumably they're also not reviewing PRs, because if they were and there is this many PRs being raised then how does the team have time to spit out code all day using CC?

People who talk about 5x or 10x productivity boosts are either doing something wrong, or just building prototype. As someone who has worked in this industry for 20 years, I literally don't understand how what some people describe can even being happening in functional SWE teams building production software.