AI is making me 100x productive in some tasks, and 2-4x in others, and 0x in some. Knowing which tasks AI is great at and delegating is like 95% of the battle.
You're doing it wrong. AI is making me 2375600x productive in all tasks.
Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
271–280 of 675 posts
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#272Earlier 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?
Are you boycotting AI or something?
If you try it yourself you'll soon find out that the answer is a very obvious yes.
You don't need a paid plan to benefit from that kind of assistance, either.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#273Earlier 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…
Totally disagree. The current state of coding AIs is “a level 2 product manager who is a world class biker balancing on a unicycle trying to explain a concept in French to a Spanish genius who is only 4 years old.” I’m not going to explain what I mean, but if you’ve used Qwen Code you understand.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#274I 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…
If the 10x thing was true we’d all be on iOS 24 and the typescript Go rewrite would have been done months ago.
But of course that’s ridiculous.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
This has never been the case in any company I've ever worked at. Even if you can finish your day's work in, say, 4 hours, you can't just dip out for the other 4 hours of the day.
Managers and teammates expect you to be available at the drop of a hat for meetings, incidents, random questions, "emergencies", etc.
Most jobs I've worked at eventually devolve into something like "Well, I've finished what I wanted to finish today. I could either stare at my monitor for the rest of the day waiting for something to happen, or I could go find some other work to do. Guess I'll go find some other work to do since that's slightly less miserable".
You also have to delicately "hide" the fact that you can finish your work significantly faster than expected. Otherwise the expectations of you change and you just get assigned more work to do.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you at least mention what the video game was, or why it was such a good implementation? Also, what was "perfect" about the code? "Perfect" is not a word I would ever use to describe code. This reads like empty hype to me, and there's more than one claim like this in these threads, where AI magically creates an app, but any description of the app itself is always conspicuously missing.
Yes Im exaggerating and its not writing a AAA game from a prompt but I asked it to make a game like Zelda and it figured it out and walked me through all the aspects of it. That's a lot more than I expected. I'm not a games programmer, so I'm probably a lot more impresse than I should be, but I went from not knowing anything about godot to having a framework up to build a 2d rpg-esque game fairly quickly and me learn…
Thanks for elaborating, this puts things into perspective, although the complexity of the end product is still unclear to me.
I do still disagree with your assessment, I think the syntactic tokens in programming languages have a kind of impedance mismatch with the tokens that LLMs, and that the formal semantics of programming languages are a bad fit with the fuzzy statistical LLMs. I firmly believe that increased LLM usage will drive software safety and quality down, simply because a) no semblance of semantic reasoning or formal verification has been applied to the code and b) a software developer will have an incomplete understanding of code not written by themself.
But our opinions can co-exist, good luck in your game development journey!
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#277This 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 way that I have seen 10x engineers in my career is as kind like this:
Junior: 100 total lines of code a day
Senior: 10,000 total lines of code a day
Guru: -100 total lines of code a day
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#278I 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 cogn…
I like the quip that AI raises the floor not the ceiling. I think it helps the bottom 20% perform more like the middle 50% but doesn't do much for people at the top.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#279I 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…
If the 10x thing was true we’d all be on iOS 24 and the typescript Go rewrite would have been done months ago. But of course that’s ridiculous.
> and the typescript Go rewrite would have been done months ago.
10x is intended to symbolize a multiplier. As Microsoft fired that guy, 10 × 0 is still 0.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#280> When I have had engineers who were 10x as valuable as others it was primarily due to their ability to prevent unnecessary work.
Interesting observation. I am inclined to agree with this myself. I'm more of a 10^0 kind of developer though.