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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

#261

Post by hnuser123456 »

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…

I think there are three factors to this: 1. What to code (longer, more specific prompts are better but take longer to write), and 2. How to code it (specify languages, libraries, APIs, etc.) And if you're trying to write code that uses a newer version of a library that works differently from what's most commonly documented, it's a long uphill battle of constantly reminding the LLM of the new changes.

If you're not specific enough, it will definitely spit out a half-baked pseudocode file where it expects you to fill in the rest. If you don't specify certain libraries, it'll use whatever is featured in the most blogspam. And if you're in an ecosystem that isn't publicly well-documented, it's near useless.

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

#262

Post by simonw »

iamjackg wrote: post #225
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?

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's a great example. (Also I love Cog.)

The training cutoff comes into play here a bit, but 95% of the time I'm fuzzy searching like that I'm happy with projects that have been around for a few years and hence are both more mature and happen to fall into the training data.

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

#263

Post by coffeebeqn »

mgfist wrote: post #155
Izkata wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x sounds nice which is probably why it stuck, but it came from actual research which found the difference was larger than 10x - but also they were measuring between best and worst, not best and average as it's used nowadays. https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...

All of this is hard to quantify. How much better than the average engineer is John Carmack, or Rob Pike or Linus? I consider myself average-ish and I don't think there's any world in which I could do what those guys did no matter how much time you gave me (especially without the hindsight knowledge of the creations). So I'd say they're all infinitely better than me.

And how much better are they than your average engineer when plopped into a mediocre organization where they aren’t the political and technical top dog? I would guess they would all quit within a week.

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

#264

Post by sureglymop »

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 do also believe that those who are often looked at or referred to as 10x engineers will maybe only see a marginal productivity increase.

The smartest programmer I know is so impressive mainly for two reasons: first, he seems to have just an otherworldly memory and seems to kind of have absolutely every little feature and detail of the programming languages he uses memorized. Second, his real power is really in cognitive ability, or the ability to always quickly and creatively come up with the smartest and most efficient yet elegant and clean solution to any given problem. Of course somewhat opinionated but in a good way. Funnily he often wouldn't know the academic/common name for some algorithm he arrived at but it just happened to be what made sense to him and he arrived at it independently. Like a talented musician with perfect pitch who can't read notation or doesn't know theory yet is 10x more talented than someone who has studied it all.

When I pair program with him, it's evident that the current iteration of AI tools is not as quick or as sharp. You could arrive at similar solutions but you would have to iterate for a very long time. It would actually slow that person down significantly.

However, there is such a big spectrum of ability in this field that I could actually see this increasing for example my productivity by 10x. My background/profession is not in software engineering but when I do it in my free time the perfectionist tendencies make me work very slowly. So for me these AI tools are actually cool for generating the first crappy proof of concepts for my side projects/ideas, just to get something working quickly.

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

#265

Post by thephyber »

The important things to remember about these claims/articles is that LLMs are useful for a wide variety of tasks. An engineer doesn’t only code, but also has to learn, search, gather / define requirements, write tests, troubleshoot, read/review other people's code, deal with project management tools, document (both for developers and for customers).

Also, one underestimated aspect is that LLMs don’t get writer’s block or get tired (so long as you can pay to keep the tokens flowing).

Also, one of the more useful benefits of coding with LLMs is that you are explicitly defining the requirements/specs in English before coding. This effectively means LLM-first code is likely written via Behavior Driven Development, so it is easier to review, troubleshoot, upgrade. This leads to lower total cost of ownership compared to code which is just cowboyed/YOLOed into existence.

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

#267

Post by dolebirchwood »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #163
mgfist wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is hard to quantify. How much better than the average engineer is John Carmack, or Rob Pike or Linus? I consider myself average-ish and I don't think there's any world in which I could do what those guys did no matter how much time you gave me (especially without the hindsight knowledge of the creations). So I'd say they're all infinitely better than me.

I guess that makes Newton a 10x scientist. Really puts in perspective how utterly unrealistic it is to be looking to hire exclusively 10x programmers - the true 10x'ers are legends, not just regular devs who type a bit faster.

It would be more sensible if the "10x" moniker was dropped altogether, and we just went back to calling these people what they've always been: "geniuses". Then there might be more realistic expectations of only finding them among 1% of the population.

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

#268

Post by zahlman »

> 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 microservice. Making developer experience investments that save everyone just a bit of time on every task. Documenting your work so that every future engineer can jump in faster. These things can add up over time to one engineer saving 10x the time company wide than what they took to build it.

What about just noticing that coworkers are repeatedly doing something that could easily be automated?

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

#269

Post by coffeebeqn »

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]

My company is all in on LLMs and honestly the improvement seems to be like 0.9x to 1.2x depending on the project. None of them are moving at break neck speed and many projects are just as bogged down by complexity as ever. Pretty big (3000+) company with a large mature codebase in multiple languages. For god knows how much money spent on it

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

#270

Post by tmaly »

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 wonder if a better metric would be developer happiness? Instead of being 2x or 5x more productive, what if we looked at what a developer enjoyed doing and figured out how to use AI for everything else?
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