Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by coffeefirst » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:10 PM UTC

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #98

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.

Yeah. The prototyping is neat. But in past lives I would literally sketch the "POC" on paper.

I sort of want to get back to that... it was really good at getting ideas across.

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

#142

Post by swader999 » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:10 PM UTC

This was the best insight in the article: Do 10x engineers actually exist? "This debate isn't something I want to weigh in on but I might have to. My answer is sometimes, kinda. When I have had engineers who were 10x as valuable as others it was primarily due to their ability to prevent unnecessary work. Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible. Getting another engineer to not build that unnecessary microservice. Making developer experience investments that save everyone just a bit of time on every task. Documenting your work so that every future engineer can jump in faster. These things can add up over time to one engineer saving 10x the time company wide than what they took to build it."

So true, a lot of value and gains are had when tech leads can effectively negotiate and creatively offer less costly solutions to all aspects of a feature.

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

#143

Post by Glyptodon » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

I don't consider myself a 10x engineer. The number one thing that I've realized makes me more productive than other engineers at my company is thinking through system design and business needs with patterns that don't take badly written product tickets literally.

What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.

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

#144

Post by jf22 » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

the__alchemist wrote: post #7

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…

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.

The code I generate with LLMs is clean and looks as good if not better than what I'd write by hand.

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

#145

Post by mgfist » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

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…

My biggest takeaway from using AI is that

(1) for my day job, it doesn't make me super productive with creation, but it does help with discovery, learning, getting myself unstuck, and writing tedious code.

(2) however, the biggest unlock is it makes working on side projects __immensely__ easier. Before AI I was always too tired to spend significant time on side projects. Now, I can see my ideas come to life (albeit with shittier code), with much less mental effort. I also get to improve my AI engineering skills without the constraint of deadlines, data privacy, tool constraints etc..

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

#146

Post by jf22 » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

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.

Then tell it to write better comments...

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

#147

Post by miggy » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

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…

In my experience, unit tests and logging code generated by LLMs tend to be overly verbose, miss meaningful assertions, and often produce boilerplate that looks correct but doesn’t test or log anything useful. It’s easy to get misled by the surface structure.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #82

coltonv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by bgwalter » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

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 "…

That bar is industry standard in the hype machine. Altman and others have set it:

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/sam-altman-ai-w...

https://brianchristner.io/how-cursor-ai-can-make-developers-...

https://thenewstack.io/the-future-belongs-to-ai-augmented-10...

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

#150

Post by coltonv » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #126

coltonv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I distinctly did not say that. I said your article was one of the ones that made me feel anxious. And it's one of the ones that spurred me to write this article. I demonstrated how your language implies a massive productivity boost from AI. Does it not? Is this not the entire point of what you wrote? That engineers who aren't using AI are crazy (literally the title) because they are missing out on all this "rocket fuel" productivity? The difference between rocket fuel and standing still has to be a pretty big improvement.

The points I make here still apply, there is not some secret well of super-productivity sitting out in the open that luddites are just too grumpy to pick up and use. Those who feel they have gotten massive productivity boosts are being tricked by occasional, rare boosts in productivity.

You said you solved hallucinations, could you share some of how you did that?