That's why I gave a range. I didn't say it is saving me 30 hours every week, I said 10 to 30 hours a week. So 30 is the max of the range, and I'd say the distribution is pretty heavily left-skewed. It really depends on what I'm doing, but I do think there are weeks where it has save me 75% of the time I would have otherwise spent. I think there are two kinds of weeks where this is the case:

1. A week where I would have otherwise actually spent the majority of my time writing out and doing a ton of refactoring of a lot of implementation code. This is very rare for me, but it does exist. I can remember how it could actually take me a whole week to just "code up" meaningfully sized prototypes or greenfield implementations of some unambiguous thing. Truly, now, for that kind of work, claude code can save me full days of mechanical work.

2. A week where there is something very subtle going on that I have to figure out, probably having to do with some component or system I'm not very familiar with yet. Having an AI tool as a rubber ducky, or like a supercharged stackoverflow, can save me days of reading, debugging, working on minimal repros, etc.

Again, I'm not saying this is the common case at all. And estimating this kind of thing is always wildly inaccurate, so sure, take it with a grain of salt. But I know that a few times now, doing estimates based on my past experience, I've said "that will take me a week" (in case #1) or "gosh, I dunno, that's a tricky one, that might take me a week to figure out" (in case #2), and instead it only took me a day.

But honestly I think people focus too much on the high end of this range. The more valuable thing to me is the large number of weeks where it saves me that 10 to 15 hours, where I can then use that time to research new things, try more ideas, say "yes" to more things, or just not spend that time working.