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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

#191

Post by steveklabnik »

coltonv wrote: post #124
simonw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Nah, it’s the way news aggregators have been we ever since they have existed.

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

#192

Post by bluefirebrand »

mgfist wrote: post #145
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 w…

> (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

I hear this take a lot but does it really make that much of an improvement over what we already had with search engines, online documentation and online Q&A sites?

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

#193

Post by lifesucks1 »

Couldn't agree more. So fed up of these stupid marketers talking about how they built a SAAS solution in days, solved all their technical problems. AI puts everything magically together. All you need is rules files. I cant even build a consistent backend I am ok with any technology it likes. Once you hit a bug it struggles to fix it without breaking 10 other things. I hope some technique comes in that can help you manage what it outputs. In its current state I would be very careful with what is being pushed to production.

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

#194

Post by rapind »

kasey_junk wrote: post #188

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 (t…

It's allowed me to be even more of a perfectionist. I'm quite enjoying it, and I review and revise everything that's produced line by line.

I doubt that's the commonly desired outcome, but it is what I want! If AI gets too expensive overnight (say 100x), then I'll be able to keep chugging along. I would miss it (claude-code), but I'm betting that by then a second tier AI would fit my process nearly as well.

I think the same class of programmers that yak shave about their editor, will also yak shave about their AI. For me, it's just augmenting how I like to work, which is probably different than most other people like to work. IMO just make it fit your personal work style... although I guess that's problematic for a large team... look, even more reasons not to have a large team!

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

#195

Post by paulcole »

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…

> but I've never found those 10x claims convincing

Who's making these claims?

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

#196

Post by __loam »

edm0nd wrote: post #175
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…

>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…

Even saying it has a dozen PhDs belies the reality that these things have no relationship with the truth

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

#197

Post by Fraterkes »

generalizations wrote: post #66

In many ways this feels like average software engineers telling on themselves. If you know the tech you're building, and you're good at splitting up your work, then you know ahead of time where the complexity is and you can tell the AI what level of granularity to build at. AI isn't magic; there is an upper limit to the complexity of a program that e.g. Sonnet 4 can write at once. If you can grok that limit, and you…

Is the implication here that you consider yourself an above-average engineer?

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

#198

Post by skydhash »

lopatin wrote: post #92
Scarblac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the hard part is figuring out the more complex parts. Getting that right is what takes the time, not typing in the more trivial parts.

Not typing the trivial parts is pretty great though

I think most developers bypass the typing of the trivial part by just using a library or a framework. And sometimes typing trivial things can be relaxing, especially after an intense bout with a complex thing.

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

#199

Post by __loam »

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…

Who buys their crap if you fire everyone?

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

#200

Post by rufius »

I don’t think AI makes me 10x more productive. It does make me close to 10x less bored though.

Much of production software engineering is writing boiler plate, building out test matrices and harnesses, scaffolding structure. And often, it’s for very similarly shaped problems at their core regardless of the company, organization, or product.

AI lets me get a lot of that out of the way and focus on more interesting work.

One might argue that’s a failure of tools or even my own technique. That might be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m less bored than I used to be.

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