The 100x engineer is back in the discourse. This time the pitch is that an engineer with the right AI tooling can do the work of a hundred. Sometimes the number is 10x, sometimes it is 100x, occasionally someone goes wild and writes 1000x. The number is always round and the unit is always missing.

What are we counting?

If a 100x engineer using Claude can do 365 days of work in 3.65 days, whose 365 days? A staff engineer shipping platform infrastructure? A junior wiring up CRUD endpoints? My grandmother on a good day? The denominator is doing all the work in that sentence and nobody ever writes it down.