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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

#121

Post by bpt3 »

jongjong wrote: post #71

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 kep…

It's making everyone faster.

That means that good developers are more productive, and bad developers create more work for everyone else at an very rapid pace.

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

#122

Post by Izkata »

hyperbovine wrote: post #90
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/ ).

10x sounds nice which is probably why it stuck, but it came from actual research which found the difference was larger than 10x - but also they were measuring between best and worst, not best and average as it's used nowadays.

https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...

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

#123

Post by re-thc »

g3f32r wrote: post #119
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the comment was showing that the project takes 9 weeks either way, but coming to that determination was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.

> was much more confident and convincing with a functional demo versus a hand-wavy figma + guesstimate.

Except it also blurs the lines and sets incorrect expectations.

Management often see code being developed quickly (without full understanding of the fine line between PoC and production ready) and soon they expect it to be done with CC in 1/2 the time or less.

Figma on the other hand makes it very clear it is not code.

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

#124

Post by coltonv »

simonw wrote: post #102
coltonv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something I have realized about Hacked News is that most of the comments on any given article are from people who are responding to the headline without actually clicking through and reading it! This is particularly true for headlines like this one which stand alone as statements.

Perhaps that's my fault for making the title almost clickbaity. My goal was to get people who felt anxious about AI turning them into dinosaurs not feel like they are missing some secret sauce, so hopefully the reach this is getting contributes that.

Again, appreciate your thoughts, I have a huge amount of respect for your work. I hope you have a good one!

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

#125

Post by tptacek »

BoxFour wrote: post #88
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's not what people mean when they bring up "hallucinations". What the author apparently meant was that they had an agent generating Terraform for them, and that Terraform was broken. That's not surprising to me! I'm sure LLMs are helpful for writing Terraform, but I wouldn't expect that agents are at the point of being able to reliably hand off Terraform that actually does anything, because I can't imagine an agent being given permission to iterate Terraform. Now have an agent write Java for you. That problem goes away: you aren't going to be handed code with API calls that literally don't exist (this is what people mean by "hallucination"), because that could wouldn't pass a compile or linter pass.

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

#126

Post by tptacek »

coltonv wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My goal here was not to publicly call out any specific individual or article. I don't want to make enemies and I don't want to be cast as dunking on someone. I get that that opens me up to criticism that I'm fighting a strawman, I accept that. Your article does not specifically say 10x, but it does say this: > Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different th…

Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not.

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

#127

Post by mentos »

megaloblasto wrote: post #103

I thought this would be another AI hate article, but it made some great points. One thing that AI has helped me with is finding pesky bugs. I mainly work on numerical simulations. At one point I was stuck for almost a week trying to figure out why my simulation was acting so strange. Finally I pulled up chatgpt, put some of my files into the context and wrote a prompt explaining the strange behavior and what I though…

Yep same experience here saved me an infinite amount of time so to me that puts me somewhere between 10x and infinity ha

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

#128

Post by bicx »

I've been using Claude Code professionally for the past 2 months, with limited agent use prior to that (via Windsurf). I would say I've seen a 30% boost in productivity overall, with significant spikes in particular types of work.

Where CC has excelled:

- New well-defined feature built upon existing conventions (10x+ boost)

- Performing similar mid-level changes across multiple files (10x+ boost)

- Quickly performing large refactors or architecture changes (10x+ boost)

- Performing analysis of existing codebases to help build my personal understanding (x10+ boost)

- Correctly configuring UI layouts (makes sense: this is still pattern-matching, but the required patterns can get more complex than a lot of humans can quickly intuit)

Where CC has floundered or wasted time:

- Anything involving temporal glitches in UI or logic. The feedback loop just can't be accomplished yet with normal tooling.

- Fixing state issues in general. Again, the feedback loop is too immature for CC to even understand what to fix unless your tooling or descriptive ability is stellar.

- Solving classes of smallish problems that require a lot of trial-and-error, aren't covered by automated tests, or require a steady flow of subjective feedback. Sometimes it's just not worth setting up the context for CC to succeed.

- Adhering to unusual or poorly-documented coding/architecture conventions. It's going to fight you the whole way, because it's been trained on conventional approaches.

Productivity hacks:

- These agents are automated, meaning you can literally have work being performed in parallel. Actual multitasking. This is actually more mentally exhausting, but I've seen my perceived productivity gains increase due to having 2+ projects going at once. CC may not beat a single engineer for many tasks, but it can literally do multiple things at once. I think this is where the real potential comes into play. Monitoring multiple projects and maintaining your own human mental context for each? That's a real challenge. - Invest in good context documents as early as possible, and don't hesitate to ask CC to insert new info and insights in its documents as you go. This is how you can help CC "learn" from its mistakes: document the right way and the wrong way when a mistake occurs.

Background: I'm a 16yoe senior fullstack engineer at a startup, working with React/Remix, native iOS (UIKit), native Android (Jetpack Compose), backends in TypeScript/Node, and lots of GraphQL and Postgres. I've also had success using Claude Code to generate Elixir code for my personal projects.

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

#130

Post by andrewmutz »

coltonv wrote: post #120
andrewmutz wrote: post #110

The part I agree about: Software engineering is about more than writing code, so accelerating coding by 10X doesn't accelerate a software engineer by 10X. The part I disagree about: I've never worked at a company that has a 3 month cycle from code-written to code-review-complete. That sounds insane and dysfunctional. AI won't fix an organization like that

Perhaps I was not clear here. My point isn't to say that one PR gets merged in 3 months. My point is to say that, lets say, 15 PRs from one dev get merged per quarter in the old days, for a 10x productivity boost that means that roughly 15 PRs get merged per 7 business days now. My point is simply that the amount of time that goes into the basic lag cycle involved in code review can't be compressed to 7 days.

I think focusing on end-to-end time confuses things more than it helps. A system can have 10X throughput with the latency being unchanged. You don't need to reduce latency or cycle time to have a 10X increase in throughput.

The better argument is that Software Engineers spend a lot of time doing things that aren't writing code and arent being accelerated by any AI code assistant

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