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

colton.dev

171–180 of 675 posts

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

#171
This is not a surprising conclusion for anyone that works in the field and uses the current gen of LLMs.

The problem is...

1. there is an enormous investment in $$$ produces a too big to fail scenario where extravagant claims will be made regardless

2. leadership has made big promises around productivity and velocity for eng

the end result of this is going to be a lot of squinting at the problem, ignoring reality and declaring victory. These AI tools are very useful in automating chore and grunt tasks.

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

#172
post #46
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's disingenuous or naive. Almost nobody decides to expressly highlight the section of code (or whole files generated by ai) they just get on with the job when there's real deadlines and it's not about coding for the sake of the art form...

Same as pretending that vibe coding isn't producing tons of slop. "Just improve your prompt bro" doesn't work for most real codebases. The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong, I wish I had as much copium as vibe coders to be blind to these things, as most of them clearly are like "it happened to them but surely won't happen to ME."

I've heard this multiple times (Tea being an example of problems with vibe coding) but my understanding was that the Tea app issues well predated vibe coding.

I have experimented with vibe coding. With Claude Code I could produce a useful and usable small React/TS application, but it was hard to maintain and extend beyond a fairly low level of complexity. I totally agree that vibe coding (at the moment) is producing a lot of slop code, I just don't think Tea is an example of it from what I understand.

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

#174
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a scary time it is for devs. We spent all this time learning this obscure skill and now when I play with claude or even chatgpt it makes really good code. I just asked it to write me a video game and it did it. Perfect godot code. I was stunned it didn't hallucinate and when I asked for clarification on a snippet of code, it perfectly answered. I think its only a matter of time until our roles are commoditized a…

Could you at least mention what the video game was, or why it was such a good implementation? Also, what was "perfect" about the code? "Perfect" is not a word I would ever use to describe code. This reads like empty hype to me, and there's more than one claim like this in these threads, where AI magically creates an app, but any description of the app itself is always conspicuously missing.

Yes Im exaggerating and its not writing a AAA game from a prompt but I asked it to make a game like Zelda and it figured it out and walked me through all the aspects of it. That's a lot more than I expected. I'm not a games programmer, so I'm probably a lot more impresse than I should be, but I went from not knowing anything about godot to having a framework up to build a 2d rpg-esque game fairly quickly and me learning as it gave me the code. Note, I used the new chatgpt study mode, so that's may be different than just regular prompts. I fully expected just broken code and random AI musings, but instead I got a very solid implementation of a game, albeit a simple one. Or at least as simple as I asked for, I imagine I can keep building out more with its help.

I also have never used godot before, and I was surprised at how well it navigated and taught me the interface as well.

At least the horror stories about "all the code is broken and hallucinations" isn't really true for me and my uses so far. If LLM's will succeed anywhere it will be in the overly logical and predictable worlds of programming languages, but that's just a guess on my part, but thus far whenever I reach out for code from LLM's, its been a fairly positive experience.

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

#175
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…

>I'd expect it to work like a very junior programmer, but it works like a very drunk senior programmer that isn't listening to you very well at all.

This seems to be the current consensus.

A very similar quote from another recent AI article:

One host compares AI chatbots to “a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time.”

https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-mys...

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

#176
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a scary time it is for devs. We spent all this time learning this obscure skill and now when I play with claude or even chatgpt it makes really good code. I just asked it to write me a video game and it did it. Perfect godot code. I was stunned it didn't hallucinate and when I asked for clarification on a snippet of code, it perfectly answered. I think its only a matter of time until our roles are commoditized a…

Could you at least mention what the video game was, or why it was such a good implementation? Also, what was "perfect" about the code? "Perfect" is not a word I would ever use to describe code. This reads like empty hype to me, and there's more than one claim like this in these threads, where AI magically creates an app, but any description of the app itself is always conspicuously missing.

Especially in a world where creating a repo in GitHub (or other forges) is frictionless.

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

#177
I could not have built EACL[^1] without AI. We use EACL at work at now, so arguably AI has made me 10x more productive, but only because I know how to write specs for AI to get what I want.

Context: EACL is an embedded ReBAC authorization library based on SpiceDB-compatible*, built in Clojure and backed by Datomic.

[^1]: https://github.com/theronic/eacl

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

#178
post #106

Claude max is $200 a month. Consider a fully loaded cost of 200k for an engineer or $16,666 per month. They only have to be >1.012x engineer for the "AI" to be worth it. Of course that $200 dollars per month is probably VC subsidized right now but there is lots of money on the table for <2x improvement.

This is precisely what I suggest, companies should pay for team plans like the one you are describing and see what comes of it.

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

#179
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a scary time it is for devs. We spent all this time learning this obscure skill and now when I play with claude or even chatgpt it makes really good code. I just asked it to write me a video game and it did it. Perfect godot code. I was stunned it didn't hallucinate and when I asked for clarification on a snippet of code, it perfectly answered. I think its only a matter of time until our roles are commoditized a…

Could you at least mention what the video game was, or why it was such a good implementation? Also, what was "perfect" about the code? "Perfect" is not a word I would ever use to describe code. This reads like empty hype to me, and there's more than one claim like this in these threads, where AI magically creates an app, but any description of the app itself is always conspicuously missing.

Let me guess... Flappy Bird or Pong. Whoa, it one-shotted it, amazing!

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

#180
post #40

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.

Writing code is the only part of my job that I like. Im not exhausted by coding because I love coding. Im exhausted by pointless meetings, talking to clients, and trying to bring non technical people up to speed with what im working on. Allowing a machine to write code for me and then manually editing it sounds like a really really miserable way to spend the precious little time I have on this earth
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