Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

colton.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 675 posts

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

#61

Post by tptacek »

dingnuts wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can believe that or not believe that without changing the implication of the previous question, which was that someone who routinely slips while writing code would be incapable of determining whether the LLM got it right. Obviously not.

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

#62

Post by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 »

Only vibe-coding influencers were ever talking about 10x multipliers.

Internally we expected 15%-25%. A big-3 consultancy told senior leadership "35%-50%" (and then tried to upsell an AI Adoption project). And indeed we are seeing 15%-35% depending on which part of the org you look and how you measure the gains.

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

#63

Post by blitzar »

recursive wrote: post #18
lvl155 wrote: 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.

Would you say they're holding it wrong?

You are meant to hold it upside down with the screen facing away, otherwise you cant possibly expect it to work.

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

#64

Post by efields »

In a week, Claude Code and I have built a PoC Rails App for a significant business use case. I intend to formally demo it for buy-in tomorrow after already doing a short "is this kind of what you're looking for?" walkthrough last week. From here, I intend to "throw it over the fence" for my staff, RoR and full-stack devs, to pick it apart and/or improve what they want to in order to bring it from 80-100% over the next two months. If they want to rewrite it from scratch, that's on the table.

It's not a ground-breaking app, its CRUD and background jobs and CSV/XLSX exports and reporting, but I found that I was able to "wireframe" with real code and thus come up with unanswered questions, new requirements, etc. extremely early in the project.

Does that make me a 10x engineer? Idk. If I wasn't confident working with CC, I would have pushed back on the project in the first place unless management was willing to devote significant resources to this. I.e. "is this really a P1 project or just a nice to have?" If these tools didn't exist I would have written spec's and excalidraw or Sketch/Figma wireframes that would have taken me at least the same amount of time or more, but there'd be less functional code for my team to use as a resource.

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

#65

Post by k1t »

mrbungie wrote: post #21
jf22 wrote: 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…

> 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…

You have misinterpreted GP's "better than what I would do" as "better than what I could do".

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

#66

Post by generalizations »

In many ways this feels like average software engineers telling on themselves. If you know the tech you're building, and you're good at splitting up your work, then you know ahead of time where the complexity is and you can tell the AI what level of granularity to build at. AI isn't magic; there is an upper limit to the complexity of a program that e.g. Sonnet 4 can write at once. If you can grok that limit, and you can grok the tech of your project, then you can tell the AI to build individual components that stay below that threshold. That works really well.

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

#67

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

tptacek wrote: post #30
mrbungie wrote: post #21

Earlier 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 didn't find it odd at all and it seems more odd to liken an LLM to a human editor.

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

#69

Post by ramon156 »

Sorry if this is grumpy, but I'm tired of seeing so many blogposts making the same conclusion from the dev's side

LLMs make writing code quick, that's it. There's nothing more to this. LLMs aren't solutioning nor are they smart. If you know what you want to build, you can build quick. Not good, quick.

That said, if managers don't care about code quality (because customer's don't care either) then who am I to judge them. I don't care.

I'm on the edge of just blacklisting the word AI from my feed.

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

#70

Post by apwell23 »

jf22 wrote: 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…

> With enough rules and good prompting this is not true.

There are atleast 10 posts on HN these days with the same discussion in circle.

1. AI sucks at code

2. you are not using my magic prompting technique

Post reply on HN