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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

#371

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

It lets me try things I couldn't commit the time to in the past, like quickly cobbling together a keystroke macro. I can also put together the outline of a plan in a few minutes. So much more can be 'touched' upon usefully.

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

#372

Post by nopinsight »

v3xro wrote: post #311
jcelerier wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably the saddest comment I've read all day. Crafting software line-by-line is the best part of programming (maybe when dealing with hardware devices you can instead rely on auto-generated code from the register/memory region descriptions).

How long would that be economically viable when a sufficient number of people can generate high-qualify code in 1/10th the time? (Obviously, it will always be possible as a hobby.)

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

#373

Post by socalgal2 »

I often wonder how much of 10x engineers is circumstance vs talent/skill. Separate from the issue of LLMs.

If I can write blue sky / green field, code. Brand new code in a new repo, no rules just write code, I can write tons of code. What bogs me down are things like tests. It can take more time to write tests than the code itself in my actual work project. Of course I know the tests are important and maybe the LLM can help here. I'm just saying that they slow me down. Waiting for code reviews slows me down. Again, they're super useful but coming from a place where the first 20-25 years of my career I didn't have them they are a drag on my performance. Another is just the size of the project I'm on. > 500 programmers on my current large project. Assume it's an OS. It's just hard to make progress on such a large project compared to a small one. And yet another which is part of the first, other people's code. If I write the whole thing or most of it, then I know exactly what to change. I've written features in code I know in days that someone who was not familiar with the code I believe would have taken months. But, me editing someone else's code without the entire state of the code base in my head is 10x slower.

That's a long way of saying, many 10xers might just be in the right circumstance to provide 10x. You're then compared against them but you're not in the same circumstance so you get different results.

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

#374

Post by bpt3 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #118
zwnow wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's an excuse for AI getting it wrong? It should know better if its so much better.

Not an excuse, no. I agree it should be better. And it will get better. Just pointing out that some mistakes were systematically happening before vibecoding became a thing. We went from "this thing is a stochastic parrot that gives you poems and famous people styled text, but not much else" to "here's a fullstack app, it may have some security issues but otherwise it mainly works" in 2.5 years. People expect perfecti…

I thought the idea was that AI would make us collectively better off, not flood the zone with technical debt as if thousands of newly minted CS/bootcamp graduates were unleashed without any supervision.

LLMs are still stochastic parrots, though highly impressive and occasionally useful ones. LLMs are not going to solve problems like "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case".

AI might get there at some point, but it won't be solely based on LLMs.

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

#375

Post by IshKebab »

socalgal2 wrote: post #373

I often wonder how much of 10x engineers is circumstance vs talent/skill. Separate from the issue of LLMs. If I can write blue sky / green field, code. Brand new code in a new repo, no rules just write code, I can write tons of code. What bogs me down are things like tests. It can take more time to write tests than the code itself in my actual work project. Of course I know the tests are important and maybe the LLM c…

Nah, I've worked with maybe 2 people I'd say were "10x", or at least 5x, and it was definitely skill.

I used to not really believe people like that existed but it turned out they're just rare enough that I hadn't worked with any yet. You could definitely go a whole career without ever working with any 10x engineers.

And also it's not like they're actually necessary for a project to succeed. They're very good but it's extremely unlikely that a project will succeed on the back of one or two very good engineers. The project I worked with them on failed for reasons nothing to do with us.

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

#376

Post by bhopro »

While I agree with some components of this blog, I also think that the author is speaking from a specific vantage point. If you are working at a large company on a pre-existing codebase, you likely have to deal with complexity that has compounded over many product cycles, pull requests, and engineer turnover. From my experience, AI has increased my performance roughly by 20%. This is primarily due to LLMs bypassing much of the human slop that has accumulated over the years on Google.

For newer languages, packages, and hardware-specific code, I have yet to use a single frontier model that has not slowed me down by 50%. It is clear to me that LLMs are regurgitating machines, and no amount of thinking will save the fact that the transformer architecture (all ML really) poorly extrapolates beyond what is in the training canon.

However, on zero-to-one projects that are unconstrained by my mag-seven employer, I am absolutely 10x faster. I can churn through boilerplate code, have faster iterations across system design, and generally move extremely fast. I don't use agentic coding tools as I have had bad experiences in how the complexity scales, but it is clear to me that startups will be able to move at lightning pace relative to the large tech behemoths.

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

#377

Post by baal80spam »

jonas21 wrote: post #369
bumblehean wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you're remote, you can. This is the crux of why a lot of developers love remote work and management hates it.

> If you're remote, you can

Uh, no?

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

#378

Post by lucumo »

coltonv wrote: post #158
tptacek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what people mean when they bring up "hallucinations". What the author apparently meant was that they had an agent generating Terraform for them, and that Terraform was broken. That's not surprising to me! I'm sure LLMs are helpful for writing Terraform, but I wouldn't expect that agents are at the point of being able to reliably hand off Terraform that actually does anything, because I can't imagine an age…

With terraform, using a property or a resource that doesn't exist is effectively the same as an API call that does not exist. It's almost exactly the same really, because under the hood terraform will try to make a gcloud/aws API call with your param and it will not work because it doesn't exist. You are making a distinction without a difference. Just because it can be caught at runtime doesn't make it insignificant.…

> Anyway, I still see hallucinations in all languages, even javascript, attempting to use libraries or APIs that do not exist. Could you elaborate on how you have solved this problem?

Gemini CLI (it's free and I'm cheap) will run the build process after making changes. If an error occurs, it will interpret it and fix it. That will take care of it using functions that don't exist.

I can get stuck in a loop, but in general it'll get somewhere.

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

#379

Post by CER10TY »

bradlys wrote: post #295
bumblehean wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

That‘s corporate jobs for you. It‘s about appearance, not results. That‘s why you make a big deal out of everything you work on.

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

#380

Post by pydry »

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

Until it spends 10 minutes fucking up the trivial part and then youre 10 minutes down and you still have to do it yourself.
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