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

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

#91

Post by coltonv »

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…

Thanks for the comment Simon! This is honestly the first one I've read where it feels like someone actually read the article. I'm totally open to the idea that some people, especially those working on the languages/tools that LLMs are good at, are indeed getting a 2x improvement in certain parts of their job.

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

#92

Post by lopatin »

Scarblac wrote: post #85
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.

Not typing the trivial parts is pretty great though

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

#93

Post by NitpickLawyer »

nurettin wrote: post #59
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…

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, d…

Sorry to be that guy, but you're using it wrong. The best flows right now are architect -> act -> test. First you have a session in "architect" / "plan" mode (depending on your ide/tool) where you discuss, ask questions, etc. Then, when everything is clear in "chat" mode, you ask the model to make a plan. You verify the plan, and then you tell it to start implementing it. You still get to approve tools, calls, tests, etc. You can also provide feedback on the way if you missed something (i.e. use uv instead of pip, etc).

Coding in a chat interface, and expecting the same results as with dedicated tools is ... 1-1.5 years old at this point. It might work, but your results will be subpar.

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

#94

Post by anonzzzies »

mavelikara wrote: post #36
symfrog wrote: 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.

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

I think this still is some kind of 'fight' between assisted and more towards 'vibe'. Vibe for me means not reading the generated code, just trying it and the other extreme is writing all without AI. I don't think people here are talking about assisted : they are taking about vibe or almost vibe coding. And its fairly terrible if the llm does not have tons of info. It can loop, hang, remove tons of features, break random things etc all while being cheerful and saying 'this is production code now, ready to deploy'. And people believe it. When you use it to assist, it is great imho.

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

#95

Post by drgiggles »

cjfd wrote: post #35
drgiggles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am pretty far to one end of the spectrum on need for comments. Very rarely is a comment useful to help you/another developer decipher the intent and function of a piece of code.

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

#96

Post by echelon »

neutronicus wrote: post #52
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…

> 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.

I can't attest to C++, but we've got a large Rust monorepo, and it's magical.

It expands match blocks against highly complex enums from different crates, then tab completes test cases after I write the first one. Sometimes even before that.

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

#97

Post by izzydata »

I don't believe that literal typing of code is the limiting factor in development work. There is the research and planning and figuring out what it is even you need to develop in the first place. By the time you know what questions to even ask an LLM you are not saving much time in my opinion. On top of that you introduce the risk of LLM hallucination when you could have looked it up from a normal web search yourself in slightly more time.

Overall it feels negligible too me in its current state.

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

#98

Post by OtherShrezzing »

efields wrote: post #64

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 nex…

If you think your CC wireframe has taken approx as much time as it'd have taken you with another tool like Figma + spec-writing, and one of your engineering team's options is "rewrite it from scratch" (without a spec), has the use of CC saved your company any time at all?

It reads like this project would have taken your company 9 weeks before, and now will take the company 9 weeks.

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

#99

Post by bpt3 »

rob_c wrote: post #40
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #19

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.

They are using them, just in a curated and deliberate way.

I use it similar to the parent poster when I am working with an unfamiliar API, in that I will ask for simple examples of functionality that I can easily verify are correct and then build upon them quickly.

Also, let me know when your calculator regularly hallucinates. I find it exhausting to have an LLM dump out a "finished" implementation and have to spend more time reviewing it than it would take to complete it myself from scratch.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

andix wrote: post #60
kirykl wrote: post #51

AI 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.

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