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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

#221

Post by briangriffinfan »

__loam wrote: post #196
edm0nd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Yes yes yes we're all aware that these are word predictors and don't actually know anything or reason. But these random dice are somehow able to give reasonably seemingly well-educated answers a majority of the time and the fact that these programs don't technically know anything isn't going to slow the train down any.

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

#223

Post by meroes »

andix wrote: post #60
kirykl wrote: post #51

AI never says it doesn’t know. It’ll always have an answer even if it’s wrong or misleading

This really depends on the prompting. I experienced it multiple times that claude code couldn't figure out how to fix a bug and just gave up. Instead of getting stuck in an infinite loop.

Usually I get the loop, which runs me out of compute, and have to wait till tmrw. Glad there is actually a way to stop it from confidently “fixing” the same issue.

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

#225

Post by iamjackg »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #192
mgfist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is the best version of fuzzy search I have ever seen: the ultimate "tip of my tongue" assistant. I can ask super vague things like "Hey, I remember seeing a tool that allows you to put actual code in your files to do codegen, what could it be?" and it instantly gives me a list of possible answers, including the thing I'm looking for: Cog.

I know that a whole bunch of people will respond with the exact set of words that will make it show up right away on Google, but that's not the point: I couldn't remember what language it used, or any other detail beyond what I wrote and that it had been shared on Hacker News at some point, and the first couple Google searches returned a million other similar but incorrect things. With an LLM I found it right away.

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

#226

Post by __loam »

doc_manhat_3 wrote: post #190
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]

There's a bunch of open source projects where we can observe that not happening in real time.

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

#227

Post by lvl155 »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #181
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.

Counter: you are looking at it wrong. You can get work done in 1/2 of the time it used to. Now you got 1/2 of the day to just mess around. Socialize or network. It’s not necessarily that you’re producing 2x.

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

#228

Post by roywiggins »

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!

people not Reading The Fine Article is as old as the Web, you're fine!

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

#229

Post by te_chris »

coltonv wrote: post #205
rufius wrote: post #200

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 wor…

I'm happy to hear that! I hope you felt seen by this line from the article: > Oh, and this exact argument works in reverse. If you feel good doing AI coding, just do it. If you feel so excited that you code more than ever before, that's awesome. I want everyone to feel that way, regardless of how they get there.

100%. It's made me like dev again because my head can be used for things other than remembering arcania - this may be a curse of using languages like Ruby and Elixir which mostly don't have great tooling.

I enjoyed the article, fwiw. Twitter was insufferable before Elon bought it, but the AI bro scene is just...wow. An entire scene who only communicate in histrionics.

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

#230

Post by kasey_junk »

coltonv wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I believe that quote in Thomas’ blog can be attributed to me. I’ve at least said something near enough to him that I don’t mind claiming it.

I _never_ made the claim that you could call that 10x productivity improvement. I’m hesitant to categorize productivity in software in numeric terms as it’s such a nuanced concept.

But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t.

I mentioned in another comment the major flaw in your productivity calculation, is that you aren’t accounting for the work that wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise. That’s where my improvements are almost universally coming from. I can improve the codebase in ways that weren’t justifiable before in places that do not suffer from the coordination costs you rightly point out.

I no longer feel like my peers are standing still, because they’ve nearly uniformly adopted ai tools. And again, you rightly point out, there isn’t much of a learning curve. If you could develop before them you can figure out how to improve with them. I found it easier than learning vim.

As for hallucinations I don’t experience them effectively _ever_. And I do let agents mess with terraform code (in code bases where I can prevent state manipulation or infrastructure changes outside of the agents control).

I don’t have any hints on how. I’m using a pretty vanilla Claude code setup. But im not sure how an agent that can write and run compile/test loops could hallucinate.

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