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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

#231

Post by oriolid »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #217
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…

It codes like a junior, has the design sense of a mid, while being a savant at algorithms.

Make it idiot at algorithms and I believe you.

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

#232

Post by code_for_monkey »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #189
ffsm8 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it so weird how many engineers seem positively giddy to get replaced by a chatbot that functionally cannot do the job. Ill help your molotovs as a service startup, free guillotine with every 6th order.

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

#233

Post by tptacek »

coltonv wrote: post #158
tptacek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what people mean when they bring up "hallucinations". What the author apparently meant was that they had an agent generating Terraform for them, and that Terraform was broken. That's not surprising to me! I'm sure LLMs are helpful for writing Terraform, but I wouldn't expect that agents are at the point of being able to reliably hand off Terraform that actually does anything, because I can't imagine an age…

With terraform, using a property or a resource that doesn't exist is effectively the same as an API call that does not exist. It's almost exactly the same really, because under the hood terraform will try to make a gcloud/aws API call with your param and it will not work because it doesn't exist. You are making a distinction without a difference. Just because it can be caught at runtime doesn't make it insignificant.…

Yeah, again, zero trouble believing that agents don't reliably produce sane Terraform.

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

#234

Post by hathawsh »

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?

Yes.

Me, typing into a search engine, a few years ago: "Postgres CTE tutorial"

Me, typing into any AI engine, in 2025: "Here is my schema and query; optimize the query using CTEs and anything else you think might improve performance and readability"

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

#235

Post by zhivota »

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…

The existence of 10x engineers is something no one believes until they meet one, and they are extremely rare so I can believe many people have never met one.

The co-founder of a company I worked at was one for a period (he is not a 10xer anymore - I don't think someone can maintain that output forever with life constraints). He literally wrote the bulk of a multi-million line system, most of the code is still running today without much change and powering a unicorn level business.

I literally wouldn't believe it, but I was there for it when it happened.

Ran into one more who I thought might be one, but he left the company too early to really tell.

I don't think AI is going to produce any 10x engineers because what made that co-founder so great was he had some kind of sixth sense for architecture, that for most of us mortals we need to take more time or learn by trial and error how to do. For him, he was just writing code and writing code and it came out right on the first try, so to speak. Truly something unique. AI can produce well specified code, but it can't do the specifying very well today, and it can't reason about large architectures and keep that reasoning in its context through the implementation of hundreds of features.

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

#236

Post by lordnacho »

I'm getting a lot of side-quest productivity out of AI. There's always a bunch of things I could do, but they are tedious. Yet they are still things I wish I could get done. Those kinds of things AI is fantastic at. Building a mock, making tests, abstracting a few things into libraries, documentation.

So it's not like I'm delivering features in one day that would have taken two weeks. But I am delivering features in two weeks that have a bunch of extra niceties attached to them. Reality being what it is, we often release things before they are perfect. Now things are a bit closer to perfect when they are released.

I hope some of that extra work that's done reduces future bug-finding sessions.

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

#237

Post by claytongulick »

kasey_junk wrote: post #230
coltonv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perceptibl…

> 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.

And this is the problem.

Masterful developers are the ones you pay to reduce lines of code, not create them.

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

#238

Post by orwin »

simonw wrote: post #219
bluefirebrand wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

Those things don't really help with getting unstuck, especially if the reason you are struck is that there tedious code that you anticipate writing and don't want to deal with.

Exactly. My two worst roadblocks are the beginning of a new feature when I procrastinate way too much (I'm a bit afraid of choosing a design/architecture and committing to it) and towards the end when I have to fix small regressions and write tests, and I procrastinate because I just don't want to. AI solved the second roadblock 100% of the time, and help with design decisions enough to be useful (Claude4 at least). The code in the middle is a plus, but tbh I often do it myself (unless it's frontend code).

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

#239

Post by mgfist »

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?

Yes. It's so dramatically better it's not even funny. It's not that information doesn't exist out there, it's more that an LLM can give it to you in a few seconds and it's tailored to your specific situation. The second part is especially helpful if the internet answer is 95% correct but is missing something specific to you that ends up taking you 20 minutes to figure out.
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