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

colton.dev

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

#71

Post by jongjong »

AI is making 10x developers 10x more productive and is making 0.1x devs 0.1x times as productive.

When I use Claude Code on my personal projects, it's like it can read my mind. As if my project is coding itself. It's very succinct and consistent. I just write my prompt and then I'm just tapping the enter key; yes, yes, yes, yes.

I also used Claude Code on someone else's code and it was not the same experience. It kept trying to implement dirty hacks to fix stuff but couldn't get very far with that approach. I had to keep reminding it "Please address the root cause" or "No hacks" or "Please take a step back and think harder about this problem." There was a lot of back-and-forth where I had to ask it to undo stuff and I had to step in and manually make certain changes.

I think part of the issue is that LLMs are better at adding complexity than at removing it. When I was working on the bad codebase, the times I had to manually intervene, the solution usually involved deleting some code or CSS. Sometimes the solution was really simple and just a matter of deleting a couple of lines of CSS but it couldn't figure it out no matter how I wrote the prompt or even if I hinted at the solution; it kept trying to solve problems by adding more code on top.

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

#72

Post by apwell23 »

drgiggles wrote: post #14
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…

[flagged]

BigLLM at it again

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

#73

Post by mrbungie »

k1t wrote: post #65
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…

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

That would be a more plaussible explanation. Not sure if that disambiguation can be inferred from the comment though.

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

#74

Post by NitpickLawyer »

zwnow wrote: post #46
rob_c wrote: post #16

Earlier 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...

Same as pretending that vibe coding isn't producing tons of slop. "Just improve your prompt bro" doesn't work for most real codebases. The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong, I wish I had as much copium as vibe coders to be blind to these things, as most of them clearly are like "it happened to them but surely won't happen to ME."

> The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong

Weren't there 2 or 3 dating apps that were launched before the "vibecoding" craze that went extremely popular and got extremely hacked weeks/months in? I also distinctly remember a social network having firebase global tokens on the clientside, also a few years ago.

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

#75

Post by gddgb »

drgiggles wrote: post #4
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…

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

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

#76

Post by coltonv »

tptacek wrote: post #44

This article sets a ludicrous bar ("10x"), then documents the author's own attempt over some indeterminate time to clear that bar. As a result, the author has classified all the AI-supporters in the industry into three categories: (1) people who are wrong in good faith, (2) people who are selling AI tools, and (3) evil bosses trying to find leverage in programmer anxiety. That aside: I still think complaining about "…

Hi there! I appreciate your comment, and I remember reading your article about AI and some of the counterarguments to it helped me get over the imposter syndrome I was feeling.

To be clear, I did not classify "all the AI-supporters" as being in those three categories, I specifically said the people posting that they are getting 10x improvements thanks to AI.

Can you tell me about what you've done to no longer have any hallucinations? I notice them particularly in a language like Terraform, the LLMs add properties that do not exist. They are less common in languages like Javascript but still happen when you import libraries that are less common (e.g. DrizzleORM).

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

#77

Post by simonw »

I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of this article.

I'm a pretty huge proponent for AI-assisted development, but I've never found those 10x claims convincing. I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.

That's not too far from this article's assumptions. From the article:

> I wouldn't be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn't translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.

I think that's an under-estimation - I suspect engineers that really know how to use this stuff effectively will get more than a 0.2x increase - but I do think all of the other stuff involved in building software makes the 10x thing unrealistic in most cases.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by AnotherGoodName »

echelon wrote: post #23
the__alchemist wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

Prompts are worth mastering. AI autocomplete is better than older autocomplete systems but of course it only works based on what you started to type.

Prompts are especially good for building a new template of structure for a new code module or basic boilerplate for some of the more verbose environments. eg. Android Java programming can be a mess, huge amounts of code for something simple like an efficient scrolling view. AI takes care of this - it's obvious code, no thought, but it's still over 100 lines scattered in XML (the view definitions), resources, and in multiple Java files.

Do you really want to be copying boilerplate like this across to many different files? Prompts that are well integrated to the IDE (they give a diff to add the code) are great (also old style Android before Jetpack sucked) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40584424/simple-android-...

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

#80

Post by zwnow »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #74
zwnow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as pretending that vibe coding isn't producing tons of slop. "Just improve your prompt bro" doesn't work for most real codebases. The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong, I wish I had as much copium as vibe coders to be blind to these things, as most of them clearly are like "it happened to them but surely won't happen to ME."

> The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong Weren't there 2 or 3 dating apps that were launched before the "vibecoding" craze that went extremely popular and got extremely hacked weeks/months in? I also distinctly remember a social network having firebase global tokens on the clientside, also a few years ago.

So that's an excuse for AI getting it wrong? It should know better if its so much better.
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