AI never says it doesn’t know. It’ll always have an answer even if it’s wrong or misleading
Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
51–60 of 675 posts
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pattern matching your last statement with what I've seen with my teammates who are more AI-oriented: I suspect this is a matter of making the metrics the goal. I would rather maintain something that is simple, works, and have targeted comments than something messy that meets the metrics you list.
I don't get all the prompt vibe coding going around. I don't use prompts to generate code. I use "tab-tab" auto complete to speed through refactorings and adding new fields / plumbing. It's easily a 3x productivity gain. On a good day it might be 10x. It gets me through boring tedium. It gets strings and method names right for languages that aren't statically typed. For languages that are statically typed, it's still…
> For languages that are statically typed, it's still better than the best IDE AST understanding.
This is emphatically NOT my experience with a large C++ codebase.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#53LLMs still leave something to be desired for DevOps related work; infrastructure code. There is still not really enough context available when crossing the division between the hardware, OS, and software.
For Terraform, specifically, Claude 4 can get thrown into infinite recursive loops trying to solve certain issues within the bounds of the language. Claude still tries to add completely invalid procedures into things like templates.
It does seem to work a bit better for standard application programming tasks.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. I'm always baffled by this. If you can't do it that well by hand, how can you discriminate its quality so confidently? I get there is a artist/art consumer analogy to be made (i.e. you can see a piece is good without knowing how to paint), but I'm not convinced it is transferrable to code. Also, not really my experience when dealing with IaC or (comple…
What an odd question. For the exact same reason people who write prose professionally usually have someone else edit their work: because editing your own work is harder, and everybody slips up sometimes.
ehhhhhhh yeah but this is like hiring Reddit to do your prose editing, considering generated code is slightly worse than what you'd find on r/programming
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I am talking about correctness, not style, coding isn't just about being able to show activity (code produced), but rather producing a system that is correctly performing the intended task
Yes, and frankly you should be spending time writing large integration tests correctly not microscopic tests that forgot how tools interact.
It's not about lines of code or quality it's about solving a problem. If the problem creates another problem then it's bad code. If it solves the problem without causing that then great. Move onto the next problem.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. I'm always baffled by this. If you can't do it that well by hand, how can you discriminate its quality so confidently? I get there is a artist/art consumer analogy to be made (i.e. you can see a piece is good without knowing how to paint), but I'm not convinced it is transferrable to code. Also, not really my experience when dealing with IaC or (comple…
What an odd question. For the exact same reason people who write prose professionally usually have someone else edit their work: because editing your own work is harder, and everybody slips up sometimes.
I'm not getting this analogy. Editors can't normally discriminate if the content itself is good (after all, the writer is the SME), but rather, only perfect its form (syntax, grammar, etc).
Well-written bullshit in perfect prose is still bullshit.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#57Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#58The worst of all is that we used to spend time thinking about real issues. Now 70% of thinking, blogging, and (in some companies) programming time is spent on how to make inferior and nondeterministic tools accomplish something.
It's like discussing in a gaming guild how to reach the next level. It isn't real.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#59> 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…
Here's my workflow (if I feel like using claude)
Me: Here's the relevant part of the code, add this simple feature.
Opus: here's the modified code blah blah bs bs
Me: Will this work?
Opus: There's a fundamental flaw in blah bleh bs bs here's the fix, but I only generate part of the code, go hunt for the lines to make the changes yourself.
Me: did you change anything from the original logic?
Opus: I added this part, do you want me to leave it as it was?
Me: closes chat
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#60AI never says it doesn’t know. It’ll always have an answer even if it’s wrong or misleading
This really depends on the prompting. I experienced it multiple times that claude code couldn't figure out how to fix a bug and just gave up. Instead of getting stuck in an infinite loop.