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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

#281

Post by fulafel »

WD-42 wrote: post #274
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…

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.

Speed of shipping software and pace of writing code are different things. Shipping software like iOS has a <50% component of programming so Amdahl's law caps the end-to-end improvement rather low, assuming other parts of the process stay the same.

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

#282

Post by nashashmi »

I was making a VB script for excel for merging individual workbooks to single workbook . Normally I would design the script myself. But this time I used copilot to do it. It would take me 30-min to 1 hour normally. But with copilot it took 15 minutes and a lot less brain cells. And less skill.

It is not making us 10x productive. It is making it 10x easier.

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

#283

Post by timmytokyo »

jf22 wrote: post #146
drgiggles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

Then tell it to write better comments...

Ah, so it's good enough to write code on its own without time-consuming, excessive hand-holding. But it's not good enough to write comments on its own.

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

#284

Post by AstroBen »

lopatin wrote: post #92
Scarblac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the hard part is figuring out the more complex parts. Getting that right is what takes the time, not typing in the more trivial parts.

Not typing the trivial parts is pretty great though

Being forced to type in trivial boilerplate means you're very motivated to abstract it. Not saying this'll offset anything but I can see AI making codebases much more verbose

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

#285

Post by jp57 »

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 Fred Brooks insight about 10x was that the best programmers were 10x as productive as the worst programmers, not the average programmer.

I guess this leaves open question about the distribution of productivity across programmers and the difference between the min and the mean. Is productivity normally distributed? Log normal? Some kind of power law?

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

#286

Post by jcelerier »

Uehreka wrote: post #273
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…

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.

Qwen Code is really not representative of the state of the art though. With the right prompt I have no problem getting Claude to output me a complete codebase (e.g. a non trivial library interfacing with multiple hardware devices) with the specs I want, in modern c++ that builds, runs, has documentation and unit tests sourced from data sheets and manufacturer specs from the go

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

#287

Post by threatofrain »

sureglymop wrote: post #264
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 cogn…

AI is strong in different places, and if it keeps on being strong in certain ways then people very soon won't be able to keep up. For example, extreme horizontal knowledge and the ability to digest new information almost instantly. That's not something anyone can do. We don't try to compete against computers on raw calculation, and soon we won't compete on this one either. We simply won't even think to compare.

People keep focusing on general intelligence style capabilities but that is the golden grail. The world could go through multiple revolutions before finding that golden grail, but even before then everything would have changed beyond recognition.

So write an integration over the API docs I just copy-pasted.

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

#288

Post by Anon84 »

Words of wisdom:

    There is no secret herbal medicine that prevents all disease sitting out in the
    open if you just follow the right Facebook groups. There is no AI coding
    revolution available if you just start vibing. You are not missing anything.
    Trust yourself. You are enough.

    Oh, and don't scroll LinkedIn. Or Twitter. Ever.

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

#289

Post by zahlman »

Izkata wrote: post #122
hyperbovine wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (I think) a reference to the 10x engineer, another myth of which I have always been highly dubious ( https://www.simplethread.com/the-10x-programmer-myth/ ).

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-...

>but also they were measuring between best and worst, not best and average as it's used nowadays.

Depending on the environment, I can imagine the worst devs being net negative.

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

#290

Post by lnenad »

generalizations wrote: post #66

In many ways this feels like average software engineers telling on themselves. If you know the tech you're building, and you're good at splitting up your work, then you know ahead of time where the complexity is and you can tell the AI what level of granularity to build at. AI isn't magic; there is an upper limit to the complexity of a program that e.g. Sonnet 4 can write at once. If you can grok that limit, and you…

I agree, and the fact that in their list of scenarios that cause these not actually mentioning some people actually are 10x definitely points to them not being self-aware.
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