Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

colton.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 675 posts

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

#161

Post by evantbyrne »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #87

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…

10x has always been an exaggeration, but I know from repeated experience it is possible to complete projects far quicker than 2x the speed of the typical team on a modern web stack. The way you do it is by writing less code. Typically this is done by using mature software as a starting point, rather than screwing around with the hot new thing. Seems fairly obvious when stated plainly, and yet so many teams make the same mistake of building from near scratch. Even worse, what teams come up with is usually slower to iterate with than existing software, because they approach it from the perspective of building a singular app rather than designing something to build generalized solutions upon.

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

#162

Post by Wilder7977 »

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.

That's a very narrow perspective. Will the tool deskill me? Will the tool lower my work quality? Will the tool make a bigger share of my work reviewing vs thinking and creating? Will the tool make the work overall less interesting (which motivates me)? Etc. Etc. This is even assuming that the FOMO is justified. So fat studies don't show this is the case, but things might change.

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

#163

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

mgfist wrote: post #155
Izkata wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

All of this is hard to quantify. How much better than the average engineer is John Carmack, or Rob Pike or Linus? I consider myself average-ish and I don't think there's any world in which I could do what those guys did no matter how much time you gave me (especially without the hindsight knowledge of the creations). So I'd say they're all infinitely better than me.

I guess that makes Newton a 10x scientist. Really puts in perspective how utterly unrealistic it is to be looking to hire exclusively 10x programmers - the true 10x'ers are legends, not just regular devs who type a bit faster.

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

#164

Post by Kiro »

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 underestimate how lazy people are. I always take shortcuts and skip taking edge cases into account. LLMs have no problem writing tedious guards and creating abstractions without hacks, which means the code becomes more robust than if I would do it by hand.

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

#165

Post by skydhash »

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 think the rules for comments on public method is to use something like doxygen to extract the reference. And most IDE can display them upon hovering. And comments can remind the caller of pre- and post-conditions.

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

#166

Post by ffsm8 »

mavamaarten wrote: post #101
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…

Yeah. I just need to babysit it too much. Take copilot, it gives good suggestions and blows me away sometimes with a block of code which is exactly what I'd type. But actively letting it code (at least with gpt4.1 or gpt4o) just doesn't work well enough for me. Half of the time it doesn't even compile, and after fixing that it's just not really correctly working either. I'd expect it to work like a very junior progra…

To date, I've not been able to effectively use Copilot in any projects.

The suggestions were always unusably bad. The /fix were always obviously and straight up false unless it was a super silly issue.

Claude Code with Opus model on the other hand was mind-blowing to me and made me change my mind on almost everything wrt my opinion of LLMs for coding.

You still need to grow the skill of how to build the context and formulate the prompt, but the buildin execution loop is a complete game changer and I didn't realize that until I actually used it effectively on a toy project myself.

MCP in particular was another thing I always thought was massively over hyped, until I actually started to use some in the same toy project.

Frankly, the building blocks already exist at this point to make a vast majority of all jobs redundant (and I'm thinking about all grunt work office jobs, not coding in particular). The tooling still need to be created, so I'm not seeing a short term realization (You should expect most companies to let people go at staggering numbers, with only small amounts of highly skilled people left to administer the agents

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

#167

Post by dowager_dan99 »

I am a dinosaur but still feel strongly enough to post this PSA: please go back and read "No Silver Bullet" (and his follow up) again. You should probably schedule a re-read every 2-5 years, just to keep your sanity in these crazy, exhausting times.

I believe his original thesis remains true: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

Over the years this has been misrepresented or misinterpreted to suggest it's false but it sure feels like "Agentic Coding" is a single development promising a massive multiplier in improvement that once again is, another accidental tool that can be helpful but is definitely not a silver bullet.

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

#168

Post by thomascgalvin »

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 experience with GenAI is that it's a significant improvement to Stack Overflow, and generally as capable as someone hired right out of college.

If I'm using it to remember the syntax or library for something I used to know how to do, it's great.

If I'm using it to explore something I haven't done before, it makes me faster, but sometimes it lies to me. Which was also true of Stack Overflow.

But when I ask it to so something fairly complex on it's own, it usually tips over. I've tried a bunch of tests with a bunch of models, and it never quite gets it right. Sometimes it's minor stuff that I can fix if I bang on it long enough, and sometimes it's a steaming pile that I end up tossing in the garbage.

For example, I've asked it to code me a web-based calculator, or a 3D model of the solar system using WebGL, and none of the models I've tried have been able to do either.

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

#169

Post by micromacrofoot »

mrugge wrote: post #27
micromacrofoot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're often repetitive if you're reading the code, but they're useful context that feeds back into the LLM. Often once the code is clear enough I'll delete them before pushing to production.

do you have proof of this being useful for llm? wouldn't you rather it re-read the actual code it generated instead of assuming that the potentially wishful thinking or stale comment is going to lead it astray?

it reads both, so with the comments it more or less parrots the desired outcome I explained... and it sometimes catches the mismatch between code and comment itself before I even mention it

I read and understand 100% of the code it outputs, so I'm not so worried about falling too far astray...

being too prescriptive about it (like prompting "don't write comments") makes the output worse in my experience

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

#170

Post by AdrianB1 »

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/ ).

It highly depends on the circumstances. In over 30 years in the industry I met 3 people that were many times more productive than everyone else around them, even more than 10 times. What does this translate to? Well, there are some extraordinary people around, very rare and you cannot count on finding some and, when you find them, it is almost impossible to retain them because management and HR never agree to pay them enough to stay around.
Post reply on HN