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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

#251

Post by mkozlows »

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…

The thing that I keep wondering about: If the coding part is 2-5x more productive for you, but the stuff around the coding doesn't change... at some point, it'll have to, right? The cost/benefit of a lot of practices (this article talks about code review, which is a big one) changes a lot if coding becomes significantly easier relative to other tasks.

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

#252

Post by ffsm8 »

simonw wrote: post #215
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 don't buy that. The linked article makes a solid argument for why that's not likely to happen: agentic loop coding tools like Claude Code can speed up the "writing code and getting it working" piece, but the software development lifecycle has so much other work be…

And I completely agree with that!

These are exactly the people that are going to stay, medium term.

Let's explore a fictional example that somewhat resembles my, and I suspect a lot of peoples current dayjob.

A Micro-Service architecture, each team administers 5-10 services and the whole application, which is once again only a small part of the platform as a whole is developed by maybe 100-200 devs. So something like ~200 micro services

The application architects are gonna be completely save in their jobs. And so are the lead devs in each team - at least from my perspective. Anyone else? I suspect MBAs in 5 yrs will not see their value anymore. That's gonna be the vast majority of all devs, that's likely going to cost 50% of the devs their jobs. And middle management will be slimmed down just as quickly, because you suddenly need a lot less managers.

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

#253

Post by plandis »

This mostly mimics my own experience. I’ve mostly gotten value out of handing off planned/scoped coding tasks to LLMs. It’s faster to have the LLM generate code and the quality is usually fine if the task is properly scoped.

Actually writing software was only like 15-20% of my time though so the efficiency wins from having an LLM write the code is somewhat limited. It’s still another tool that makes me more productive but I’ve not figured out a way to really multiplicatively increase my productivity.

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

#254

Post by mullingitover »

mavamaarten wrote: post #101
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…

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…

> But actively letting it code (at least with gpt4.1 or gpt4o)

It's funny, Github Copilot puts these models in the 'bargin bin' (they are free in 'ask' mode, whereas the other models count against your monthly limit of premium requests) and it's pretty clear why, they seem downright nerfed. They're tolerable for basic questions but you wouldn't use them if price weren't a concern.

Brandwise, I don't think it does OpenAI any favors to have their models be priced as 'worthless' compared to the other models on premium request limits.

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

#255

Post by recursive »

zoechi wrote: post #222

For me the main benefit is that AI chat provides at least 10x better results than Google ~search~ Ad results

Ad-free LLM output won't last. Or at least you'll pay a premium for it. Personally, I do pay for a search engine subscription (Kagi) in an attempt to align my interests with my search results.

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

#256

Post by coffeebeqn »

mkozlows wrote: post #251
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…

The thing that I keep wondering about: If the coding part is 2-5x more productive for you, but the stuff around the coding doesn't change... at some point, it'll have to, right? The cost/benefit of a lot of practices (this article talks about code review, which is a big one) changes a lot if coding becomes significantly easier relative to other tasks.

Why would it have to? Most of the job is trying to understand what people really want and that’s not any easier than it was 10 or 30 years ago

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

#257

Post by kasey_junk »

claytongulick wrote: post #237
kasey_junk wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every. Single. Time. You say you get productivity gains from ai tools on the internet someone will tell you that you weren’t good at your job before the ai tooling.

Perhaps, start from the assumption that I have in fact spent a fair bit of time doing this job at a high level. Where does that mental exercise take you with regard to your own position on ai tools.

In fact, you don’t have to assume I’m qualified to speak on the subject. Your retort assumes that _everyone_ who gets improvement is bad at this. Assume any random proponent isn’t.

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

#258

Post by simonw »

mkozlows wrote: post #251
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…

The thing that I keep wondering about: If the coding part is 2-5x more productive for you, but the stuff around the coding doesn't change... at some point, it'll have to, right? The cost/benefit of a lot of practices (this article talks about code review, which is a big one) changes a lot if coding becomes significantly easier relative to other tasks.

Yes, absolutely. Code used to be more expensive to write, which meant that a lot of features weren't sensible to build - the incremental value they provided wasn't worth the implementation effort.

Now when I'm designing software there are all sorts of things where I'm much less likely to think "nah, that will take too long to type the code for".

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

#259

Post by cleak »

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’ve found I do get small bursts of 10x productivity when trying to prototype an idea - much of the research on frameworks and such just goes away. Of course that’s usually followed by struggling to make a seemingly small change for an hour or two. It seems like the 10x number is just classic engineers underestimating tasks - making estimates based on peak productivity that never materializes.

I have found for myself it helps motivate me, resulting in net productivity gain from that alone. Even when it generates bad ideas, it can get me out of a rut and give me a bias towards action. It also keeps me from procrastinating on icky legacy codebases.

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

#260

Post by hnroo99 »

lordnacho wrote: post #236

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…

Side-quest productivity is a great way to put it... It does feel like AI effectively enables the opposite of "death by a thousand cuts" (life by a thousand bandaids?)
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