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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

#81

Post by bpt3 »

lightweb wrote: post #53

LLMs 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 thing…

It's not surprising to me that it struggles with a language where there aren't billions of lines of code available to use as training data.

I wonder if that's all it is, or if the lack of context you mention is a more fundamental issue.

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

#82

Post by tptacek »

coltonv wrote: post #76
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 an…

Can you help me understand which articles you're referring to? A link to the biggest "AI made me a 10x developer" article you've read would certainly clear this up.

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

#83

Post by wahnfrieden »

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're forgetting that code quality also requires time. Developers make tradeoffs all the time on how much time to invest into improving the quality of what they write, for both new and existing code. When someone claims that LLMs can produce higher-quality code it can include quality levels that may be unjustifiably slow to hand-craft depending on constraints and needs.

Related - agentic LLMs may be slow to produce output but they are parallelizable by an individual unlike hand-written work.

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

#84

Post by octo888 »

2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote: post #62

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.

What are you measuring?

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

#85

Post by Scarblac »

generalizations wrote: post #66

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…

But the hard part is figuring out the more complex parts. Getting that right is what takes the time, not typing in the more trivial parts.

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

#86

Post by apwell23 »

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.

its an illusion that you have discovered some golden promoting workflows. If you had then you would share it instead of being handwavy and secretive.

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

#87

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

The only people who get 10x productivity are people who are either:

- solo projects

- startups with few engineers doing very little intense code review if any at all

- people who don't know how to code themselves.

Nobody else is realistically able to get 10x multipliers. But that doesn't mean you can't get a 1.5-2x multiplier. I'd say even myself at a large company that moves slow have been able to realize this type of multiplier on my work using cursor/claude code. But as mentioned in the article the real bottleneck becomes processes and reviews. These have not gotten any faster - so in real terms time to ship/deliver isn't much different than before.

The only attempt that we should make at minimizing review times is by making them higher priority than development itself. Technically this should already be the case but in my experience almost no engineer outside of really disciplined companies and not in FAANG actually makes reviews a high priority, because unfortunately code reviews are not usually part of someones performance review and slows down your own projects. And usually your project manager couldn't give two shits about someone elses work being slow.

Processes are where we can make the biggest dent. Most companies as they get large have processes that get in the way of forward velocity. AI first companies will minimize anything that slows time to ship. Companies simply utilizing AI and expecting 10x engineers without actually putting in the work to rally around AI as a first class citizen will fall behind.

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

#88

Post by BoxFour »

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 "…

> I still think complaining about "hallucination" is a pretty big "tell".

The conversation around LLMs is so polarized. Either they’re dismissed as entirely useless, or they’re framed as an imminent replacement for software developers altogether.

Hallucinations are worth talking about! Just yesterday, for example, Claude 4 Sonnet confidently told me Godbolt was wrong wrt how clang would compile something (it wasn’t). That doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit heavily from the session, just that it’s not a replacement for your own critical thinking.

Like any transformative tool, LLMs can offer a major productivity boost but only if the user can be realistic about the outcome. Hallucinations are real and a reason to be skeptical about what you get back; they don’t make LLMs useless.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you specifically are blind to this fact. But sometimes it’s warranted to complain about hallucinations!

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

#89

Post by Bootvis »

recursive wrote: post #50
echelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use tab auto complete, and i think it's a 5% productivity gain. On a good day, maybe 10%. I haven't put much effort into optimizing the setup or learning advanced usage patterns or anything. I'm using stock copilot, provided by my employer. If I had to pay for it, I wouldn't be using it, as it doesn't justify the cost.

Really, what are you making that a 5% increase in productivity doesn’t justify a Copilot subscription?

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

#90

Post by hyperbovine »

simonw wrote: post #77

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 artic…

This is (I think) a reference to the 10x engineer, another myth of which I have always been highly dubious (https://www.simplethread.com/the-10x-programmer-myth/).
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