Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

colton.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 675 posts

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

#351

Post by newswasboring »

necovek wrote: post #204
fnands wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible One of our EMs did this this week. He did a lot of homework: spoke to quite a few experts and pretty soon realised this task was too hard for his team to ever accomplish, if it was even possible. Lobbied the PM and, a VP and a C-level, but managed to stop a lot of wasted work from being done. Sometimes the most important language to know as a dev is English* s/E…

An aside, but I am curious: as an old hat today, I now find that using the Perl RE (though some of it lives on through sed) syntax as "we used to do back in the day" in regular communications confuses most people. People are usually unfamiliar with it, so I am slowly phasing it out. What's your experience? And what do the "kids" use these days to indicate alternative options (as above — though for that, I use bash {}…

/s/ is kind of a skeuomorph for me. I have never used sed but I understand this syntax.

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

#352

Post by nurettin »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #93
nurettin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my workflow (if I feel like using claude) Me: Here's the relevant part of the code, add this simple feature. Opus: here's the modified code blah blah bs bs Me: Will this work? Opus: There's a fundamental flaw in blah bleh bs bs here's the fix, but I only generate part of the code, go hunt for the lines to make the changes yourself. Me: did you change anything from the original logic? Opus: I added this part, d…

Sorry to be that guy, but you're using it wrong. The best flows right now are architect -> act -> test. First you have a session in "architect" / "plan" mode (depending on your ide/tool) where you discuss, ask questions, etc. Then, when everything is clear in "chat" mode, you ask the model to make a plan. You verify the plan, and then you tell it to start implementing it. You still get to approve tools, calls, tests,…

Nah it's good thanks for your input. I saw people use plan.md and todo.md and ide/commandline for this before. manus.ai demonstrates this via its chat interface as well.

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

#353

Post by codr7 »

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…

Totally agree, the best work isn't very visible.

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

#354

Post by bit1993 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #257
claytongulick wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibly faster pace than one who isn’t. And this is the problem. Masterful developers are the ones you pay to reduce lines of code, not create them.

Every. Single. Time. You say you get productivity gains from ai tools on the internet someone will tell you that you weren’t good at your job before the ai tooling. Perhaps, start from the assumption that I have in fact spent a fair bit of time doing this job at a high level. Where does that mental exercise take you with regard to your own position on ai tools. In fact, you don’t have to assume I’m qualified to speak…

I think what GP is saying is that in most cases generating allot of code is not a good thing. Every line of LLM generated code has to be audited because they are prone to hallucinations and auditing someone else's code is much more difficult and time consuming than auditing your own code. Allot of code also requires more maintenance.

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

#355

Post by baxtr »

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…

The problem is, if you don’t achieve 10x the venture case won’t work out properly.

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

#356

Post by finaard »

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 to get an impression that they'd be performing like them - but not actually performing.

It helps me being lazy because I have a rough expectation of what the outcome should be - and I can directly spot any corner cases or other issues the AI proposed solution has, and can either prompt it to fix that, or (more often) fix those parts myself.

The bottom 20% may not have enough skill to spot that, and they'll produce superficially working code that'll then break in interesting ways. If you're in an organization that tolerates copy and pasting from stack overflow that might be good enough - otherwise the result is not only useless, but as it provides the illusion of providing complete solution you're also closing the path of training junior developers.

Pretty much all AI attributed firings were doing just that: Get rid of the juniors. That'll catch up with us in a decade or so. I shouldn't complain, though - that's probably a nice earning boost just before retirement for me.

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

#357

Post by kkukshtel »

mgfist wrote: post #145
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…

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…

2 heavily resonates with me. Simon Wilson made the point early on that AI makes him more ambitious with his side projects, and I heavily agree. Suddenly lots of things that seemed more or less un-feasible are now not only do-able, but can actually meet or exceed your own assumptions for them.

Being able to sit down after a long way of work and ask an AI model to implement some bug or feature on something while you relax and _not_ type code is a major boon. It is able to immediately get context and be productive even when you are not.

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

#358

Post by [deleted] »

Fraterkes wrote: post #197
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…

Is the implication here that you consider yourself an above-average engineer?

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by itissid »

A few things need to happen very soon(if the signs are not here already):

1. Tech Company's should be able to accelerate and supplant the FAANGs of this world. Like even if 10x was discounted to 5x. It would mean that 10 human years of work would be shrunk down to 2 to make multi-billion dollar companies. This is not happening right now. If this does not start happening with the current series of model, murphy's law (e.g. interest rate spike at some point) or just damn show me the money brutal questions would tell people if it is "working".

2. I think Anthropic's honcho did a back of the envelope number of 600$ for every human in the US(I think just it was just the US) was necessary to justify Nvidia's market Cap. This should play out by the end of this year or in Q3 report.

Post reply on HN