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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

#321

Post by bigfishrunning »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #263
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.

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.

Good engineers don't stay in mediocre organizations, mediocre ones do. Do you think these "top dogs" were at the top of their game from day one? They all learned, just like everyone else; talent just gave them a higher ceiling.

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

#322

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

varispeed wrote: post #299
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…

I don't think the junior developer comparison holds up too well ...

1) The junior developer is able to learn from experience and feedback, and has a whole brain to use for this purpose. You may have to provide multiple pointers, and it may take them a while to settle into the team and get productive, but sooner or later they will get it, and at least provide a workable solution if not what you may have come up with yourself (how much that matters depends on how wisely you've delegated tasks to them). The LLM can't learn from one day to the next - it's groundhog day every day, and if you have to give up with the LLM after 20 attempts it'd be the exact same thing tomorrow if you were so foolish to try again. Companies like Anthropic apparently aren't even addressing the need for continual learning, since they think that a larger context with context compression will work as an alternative, which it won't ... memory isn't the same thing as learning to do a task (learning to predict the actions that will lead to a given outcome).

2) The junior developer, even if they are only marginally useful to begin with, will learn and become proficient, and the next generation of senior developer. It's a good investment training junior developers, both for your own team and for the industry in general.

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

#323

Post by jes5199 »

skadamou wrote: post #278
sureglymop wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

maybe, but I find that it makes it much faster to do things that _I already know how to do_, and can only slowly, ploddingly get me to places that I don't already have a strong mental model for, as I have to discover mistakes the hard way

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

#324

Post by throwawaymaths »

briangriffinfan wrote: post #221
__loam wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even saying it has a dozen PhDs belies the reality that these things have no relationship with the truth

Yes yes yes we're all aware that these are word predictors and don't actually know anything or reason. But these random dice are somehow able to give reasonably seemingly well-educated answers a majority of the time and the fact that these programs don't technically know anything isn't going to slow the train down any.

i just don't get why people say they don't reason. It's crazy talk. the kv cache is effectively a unidirectional turing machine so it should be possible to encode "reasoning" in there. and evidence shows that llms occasionally does some light reasoning. just because it's not great at it (hard to train for i suppose) doesn't mean it does it zero.

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

#325

Post by [deleted] »

skydhash wrote: post #198
lopatin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not typing the trivial parts is pretty great though

I think most developers bypass the typing of the trivial part by just using a library or a framework. And sometimes typing trivial things can be relaxing, especially after an intense bout with a complex thing.

[deleted]

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #192
mgfist wrote: post #145

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by dclowd9901 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #298

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 creat…

I'm not sure that math makes sense over the long run. Sure, at first you scaffold together an app from scratch, but I suspect over time, the LLM's capability of maintaining it precipitously drops. At some point, you will like reach a productivity level of zero, as now your application has become too complex to fit in a context window and you have no idea how it actually works. So what is the productivity multiplier then?

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

#329

Post by zepolen »

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.

Newton was a 1000x

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

#330

Post by docmars »

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…

With something like Devin, where it integrates directly with your repo and generates documentation based on your project(s), it's much more productive to use as an agent. I can delegate like 4-5 small tasks that would normally take me a full day or two (or three) of context switching and mental preparation, and knock them out in less than a day because it did 50-80% of the work, leaving only a few fixes or small pivot for me to wrap them up.

This alone is where I get a lot of my value. Otherwise, I'm using Cursor to actively solve smaller problems in whatever files I'm currently focused on. Being able to refactor things with only a couple sentences is remarkably fast.

The more you know about your language's features (and their precise names), and about higher-level programming patterns, the better time you'll have with LLMs, because it matches up with real documentation and examples with more precision.

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