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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

#291

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

There was a recent study concluding that AI made experienced developers 20% SLOWER to complete tasks rather than any faster !

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Obviously it depends on what you are using the AI to do, and how good a job you do of creating/providing all the context to give it the best chance of being successful in what you are asking.

Maybe a bit like someone using a leaf blower to blow a couple of leaves back and forth across the driveway for 30 sec rather than just bending down to pick them up.... It seems people find LLMs interesting, and want to report success in using them, so they'll spend a ton of time trying over and over to tweak the context and fix up what the AI generated, then report how great it was, even though it'd have been quicker to do it themselves.

I think agentic AI may also lead to this illusion of, or reported, AI productivity ... you task an agent to do something and it goes off and 30 min later creates what you could have done in 20 min while you are chilling and talking to your workmates about how amazing this new AI is ...

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

#292

Post by zahlman »

adocomplete wrote: post #243

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.

>and 0x in some

As in, it's now completely preventing you from doing things you could have before?

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

#293

Post by AdrianB1 »

necovek wrote: post #211
AdrianB1 wrote: post #181

Earlier 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.

The first red flag there is "2x their output". You can find many an anecdote where a good engineer produced better solution in fewer lines of code (or sometimes, by removing code — the holy grail). So always aim for outcomes , not output :) At my company, we did promote people quickly enough that they are now close to double their salaries when they started a year or so ago, due to their added value as engineers in t…

When I go to buy 2 bottles of milk I am never offered to get it for 1.x the price of one bottle. I don't see any way it is fair to deliver double and get just 1.5x, in a hypothetical scenario just for the sake of the discussion. The suggestion to work 50% of the time and relax, socialize and network the other 50% is way more reasonable, when possible (not in my case).

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

#294

Post by zahlman »

simonw wrote: post #102
coltonv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comment Simon! This is honestly the first one I've read where it feels like someone actually read the article. I'm totally open to the idea that some people, especially those working on the languages/tools that LLMs are good at, are indeed getting a 2x improvement in certain parts of their job.

Something I have realized about Hacked News is that most of the comments on any given article are from people who are responding to the headline without actually clicking through and reading it! This is particularly true for headlines like this one which stand alone as statements.

> most of the comments on any given article are from people who are responding to the headline without actually clicking through and reading it!

Well, the people who quote from TFA have usually at least read the part they quoted ;)

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

#295

Post by bradlys »

bumblehean wrote: post #275
lvl155 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, "e…

I'll go even further. I've been the guy who gets all his work done way faster than others. You know what happens? I get assigned way more work than most people until I am overflowing and the literal bottleneck is my peers being able to code review everything I do. Yet, I am still blamed for overproducing then too cause now I am creating too much work for my peers!

Literally unwinnable scenarios. Only way to succeed is to just sit your ass in the chair. Almost no manager actually cares about your actual output - they all care about presentation and appearances.

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

#296

Post by zoeysmithe »

tovej wrote: post #276
zoeysmithe wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm playing with it still and now am adding more scenes and more logic. I think the complexity here is whatever my goals are. I'm not sure what the practical limits here are, or at least they exceed my own ability in games development right now. This is just a toy game, but as I reach into claude and gpt, I can keep going, which is nice. I already have coding experience so I'm not exactly a 'vibe coder' but I think professionally, I dont think people with zero coding experience are getting dev roles, but instead the role will change like my example of the modern mechanic or modern sysadmin above.

As far as QA goes, we then circle back to the tool itself being the cure for the problems the tool brings in, which is typical in technology. The same way agile/'break things' programming's solution to QA was to fire the 'hands on' QA department and then programmatically do QA. Mostly for cost savings, but partly because manual QA couldn't keep up.

I think like all artifacts in capitalism, this is 'good enough,' and as such the market will accept it. The same way my laggy buggy Windows computer would be laughable to some in the past. I know if you gave me this Win11 computer when I was big into low-footprint GUI linux desktop, I would have been very unimpressed, but now I'm used to it. Funny enough, I'm migrating back to kubuntu because Windows has become unfun and bloaty and every windows update feels a bit like gambling. But that's me. I'm not the typical market.

I think your concerns are real and correct factually and ideologically, but in terms of a capitalist market will not really matter in the end, and AI code is probably here to stay because it serves the capital owning class (lower labor costs/faster product = more profit for them). How the working class fares or if the consumer product isn't as good as it was will not matter either unless there's a huge pushback, which thus far hasn't happened (coders arent unionizing, consumers seem to accept bloaty buggy software as the norm). If anything the right-wing drift of STEM workers and the 'break things' ideology of development has primed the market for lower-quality AI products and AI-based workforces.

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

#297

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

tptacek wrote: post #44

This article sets a ludicrous bar ("10x"), then documents the author's own attempt over some indeterminate time to clear that bar. As a result, the author has classified all the AI-supporters in the industry into three categories: (1) people who are wrong in good faith, (2) people who are selling AI tools, and (3) evil bosses trying to find leverage in programmer anxiety. That aside: I still think complaining about "…

> That aside: I still think complaining about "hallucination" is a pretty big "tell".

And I think that sentence is a pretty big tell, so ...

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

#298

Post by TrackerFF »

Say you want to create a web app, but you don't know any web dev. You spend a couple of months reading front-end and back-end dev, incrementally create something, and after half a year you've made a web app you like. Say you spent 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks, going from zero to a functional web app. So you spent 120 hours in total.

Now let's say you use Claude code, or whatever, and you're able to create the same web app over a weekend. You spend 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, in total 12 hours.

That's 10x increase in productivity right there. Did it make you a 10x better programmer? Nope, probably not. But your productivity went up by a tenfold.

And at least to me, that's sort of how it has worked. Things I didn't have motivation or energy to get into before, I can get into over a weekend.

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

#299

Post by varispeed »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #291

There was a recent study concluding that AI made experienced developers 20% SLOWER to complete tasks rather than any faster ! https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 Obviously it depends on what you are using the AI to do, and how good a job you do of creating/providing all the context to give it the best chance of being successful in what you are asking. Maybe a bit like someone using a leaf blower to blow a couple of leav…

Depending how they used them. You can say similar thing about having junior developers in the team that you have to delegate tasks to. It takes time to explain to them what needs to be done, nudge into right solution, check etc.

But maybe another thing is not considered - while things may take longer, they ease cognitive load. If you have to write a lot of boilerplate or you have a task to do, but there are too many ways to do it, you can ask AI to play it out for you.

What benefit I can see the most is that I no longer use Google and things like Stack Overflow, but actual books and LLMs instead.

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

#300

Post by mrbombastic »

jp57 wrote: post #285
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?

The worst programmers i have worked with have negative productivity in that they leave a mess of work for everyone else, so 10x programmers must be the reason any of us are employed!
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