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Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

colton.dev

31–40 of 675 posts

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#31
post #12

Takes on dev-focused AI is so divided right now. Appears some people just don’t understand the workflows that are effective. It actually takes a lot of work to set it up. It’s not as simple as typing in prompts.

It's lik monads. You either know how to use it or you don't. Those who claim to know seem unable to explain it so that those who don't can reproduce the success.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#32
post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

That's how I detect who is using LLMs at work.

  # loop over the images
  for filename in images_filenames:

    # download the image
    image = download_image(filename)
  
    # resize the image
    resize_image(image)

    # upload the image
    upload_image(image)

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#33
post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

99% of comments are not needed as they just re-express what the code below does.

I prefer to push for self documenting code anyway, never saw the need for docs other than for an API when I'm calling something like a black box.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#34
Here's a thesis:

Maybe LLMs make you 10x faster at using boilerplate-heavy things like Shadcn/ui or Tanstack.

...which is still only about half as fast as using a sane ecosystem.

IMO this is why there's so many diverging opinions about the productivity of AI tools.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#35
post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

Very often comments generated by humans are also useless. The reason for this are mandated comment policies, e.g., 'every public method should have a comment'. An utterly disgusting practice. One should only have a comment if one has something interesting to say. In a not-overly-complex code base there should maybe be a comment perhaps every 100 lines or so. In many cases it makes more sense to comment the unit tests than the code.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#36
post #6
post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Do you have a link to some of the code that you have produced using this approach? I am yet to see a public or private repo with non-trivial generated code that is not fundamentally flawed.

Not the OP, not my code. But here is Mitchel Hashimoto showing his workflow and code in Zig, created with AI agent assistance: https://youtu.be/XyQ4ZTS5dGw

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#38
post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

What a scary time it is for devs. We spent all this time learning this obscure skill and now when I play with claude or even chatgpt it makes really good code. I just asked it to write me a video game and it did it. Perfect godot code. I was stunned it didn't hallucinate and when I asked for clarification on a snippet of code, it perfectly answered.

I think its only a matter of time until our roles are commoditized and vibe-coding becomes the norm in most industries.

Vibe coding being a dismissive term on developing a new skillset. For example we'll be doing more planning and testing and such instead of writing code. The same way, say, sysadmins just spin up k8s instead of racking servers or car mechanics read diagnosis codes from readers and, often, just replace an electric part instead of hand-tuning carbs or gapping spark plugs and such. That is to say, a level of skill is being abstracted away.

I think we just have to see this, most likely, as how things will get done going forward.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#39
post #16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to some of the code that you have produced using this approach? I am yet to see a public or private repo with non-trivial generated code that is not fundamentally flawed.

That's disingenuous or naive. Almost nobody decides to expressly highlight the section of code (or whole files generated by ai) they just get on with the job when there's real deadlines and it's not about coding for the sake of the art form...

If the generated implementation is not good, you're trading short-term "getting on with the job" and "real deadlines" for mid-to-long-term slowdown and missed deadlines.

In other words, it matters whether the AI is creating technical debt.

Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome

#40

I dont use ai code generation tools, I just use claude as a search engine. It hasn't changed the output rate of my code but I believe that its improved the quality of it by exposing me to patterns and features that I otherwise may not have. I used to take a very object oriented approach to code, but when I would ask claude to look at my code and critique it, it would often lead me into more functional patterns, with…

> I dont use ai code generation tools

Then unfortunately you're leaving yourself at a serious disadvantage.

Good for you if you're able to live without a calculator, but frankly the automated tool is faster and leaves you less exhausted so you should be taking advantage of it.

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