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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

#181

Post by AdrianB1 »

Glyptodon wrote: post #143

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. A…

I don't consider myself a 2x engineer; my company tells me that by not paying me 2x vs my colleagues, even if I know (and others believe that too) I deliver more than 2x their output.

Using AI will change nothing in this context.

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

#182

Post by fnands »

swader999 wrote: post #142

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 micr…

> Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible

One of our EMs did this this week. He did a lot of homework: spoke to quite a few experts and pretty soon realised this task was too hard for his team to ever accomplish, if it was even possible. Lobbied the PM and, a VP and a C-level, but managed to stop a lot of wasted work from being done.

Sometimes the most important language to know as a dev is English*

s/English/YourLanguageOfChoice/g

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

#183

Post by doc_manhat_3 »

siva7 wrote: post #68

I beg to differ. My diffs are 10x bigger than before though i don't have any more time to review them.

This is the point that the author is making. 10x bigger diff is probably not leading to 10x productivity.

[In fact you can sometimes find that 10x bigger diff leads to decreased productivity down the line...]

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

#184

Post by dclowd9901 »

> Thus, AI's best use case for me remains writing one-off scripts. Especially when I have no interest in learning deeper fundamentals for a single script, like when writing a custom ESLint rule.

Perfectly put. I've been using a lot of AI for shell scripting. Granted I should probably have better knowledge of shell but frankly I think it's a terrible language and only use it because it enjoys wide system support and is important for pipelining. I prefer TS (and will try to write scripts and such in it if I can) and for that I don't use AI almost at all.

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

#185

Post by necovek »

ffsm8 wrote: post #166
mavamaarten wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Thanks for this perspective, but I am a bit confused by some of your takes: you used "Claude Code with Opus model" in "the same toy project" with great success, which led you to conclude that this will "make a vast majority of all jobs redundant".

Toy project viability does not connect with making people redundant in the process (ever, really) — at least not for me. Care to elaborate where do you draw the optimism from?

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

#186

Post by OutputRiff »

I find myself largely agreeing with this post.

In some cases, LLMs can be a real speed boost. Most of the time, that has to do with writing boilerplate and prototyping a new "thing" I want to try out.

Inevitably, if I like the prototype, I end up re-writing large swaths of it to make it even half way productizable. Fundamentally, LLMs are bad at keeping an end goal in mind while working on a specific feature and it's terrible at holding enough context to avoid code duplication and spaghetti.

I'd like to see them get better and better, but they really are limited to whatever code they can ingest on the internet. A LOT of important code is just not open for consumption in sufficient quantities for it to learn. For this reason, I suspect LLMs will really never be all that good for non-web based engineering. Wheres all the training data gonna come from?

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

#187

Post by msgodel »

If you wanted to make me 10x as productive in the past the best thing you could have done is quit forcing use of shared services and infrastructure I don't have control over.

Any codebase that's difficult for me to read would be way too large to use an LLM on.

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

#188

Post by kasey_junk »

I largely agree with the gist of this article but its calculation about productivity is very flawed as it doesn’t account for the time things sat on the backlog, or the things that wouldn’t have been done at all.

Where I see major productivity gains are on small, tech debt like tasks, that I could not justify before. Things that I can start with an async agent, let sit until I’ve got some downtime on my main tasks (the ones that involve all that coordination). Then I can take the time to clean them up and shepherd them through.

The very best case of these are things where I can move a class of problem from manually verified to automatically verified as that kick starts a virtuous cycle that makes the ai system more productive.

But many of them are boring refactors that are just beyond what a traditional refactoring tool can do.

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

#189

Post by bluefirebrand »

ffsm8 wrote: post #166
mavamaarten wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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

I'm gonna pivot to building bomb shelters maybe

Or stockpiling munitions to sell during the troubles

Maybe some kind of protest support saas. Molotov deliveries as a service, you still have to light them and throw them but I guarantee next day delivery and they will be ready to deploy into any data center you want to burn down

What Im trying to say is "companies letting people go in staggering numbers" is a societal failure state not an ideal

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

#190

Post by doc_manhat_3 »

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…

I think even claims of 2-5x are highly suspect. It would imply that if your team is using AI then all else equal they accomplish 2-5 times as much in a quarter. I don't know about you but I'm certainly not seeing this and most people on my team use AI.

[And to those saying we're using it wrong... well I can't argue with something that's not falsifiable]

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