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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

#381

Post by tptacek »

coltonv wrote: post #150
tptacek wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not.

> Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not. I distinctly did not say that. I said your article was one of the ones that made me feel anxious. And it's one of the ones that spurred me to write this article. I demonstrated how your language implies a massive productivity boost from AI. Does it not? Is this not the entire point of what you wrote? That engineers who aren't using AI are crazy (literally th…

I asked for an example of one of the articles you'd read that said that LLMs were turning ordinary developers into 10x developers. You cited my article. My article says nothing of the sort; I find the notion of "10x developers" repellant.

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

#382

Post by CER10TY »

baal80spam wrote: post #377
jonas21 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It‘s easier, since you don‘t have to stare at your monitor for 4 hours straight. But still, people expect availability since you‘re paid for 8 hours.

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

#383

Post by QuercusMax »

jes5199 wrote: post #323
skadamou wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've only used Copilot, but this is just about exactly right. (I've only used it for Python.)

If I'm writing a series of very similar test cases, it's great for spamming them out quickly, but I still need to make sure they're actually right. This is easier to spot errors because I didn't type them out.

It's also decent for writing various bits of boilerplate for list / dict comprehensions, log messages (although they're usually half wrong, but close enough to what I was thinking), time formatting, that kind of thing. All very standard stuff that I've done a million times but I may be a little rusty on. Basically StackOverflow question fodder.

But for anything complex and domain-specific, it's more wrong than it's right.

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

#385

Post by CER10TY »

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…

The issue is that it‘ll absolutely _suck_. If I tell Claude Code to scaffold a web app from 0 outside of React it‘s terrible.

So no, imho people with no app dev skills cannot just build something over a weekend, at least something that won‘t break when the first user logs in.

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

#386

Post by pmnord »

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.

This is a truism across the entire web

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

#387

Post by leptons »

ffsm8 wrote: post #166
mavamaarten wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To date, I've not been able to effectively use Copilot in any projects. The suggestions were always unusably bad. The /fix were always obviously and straight up false unless it was a super silly issue. Claude Code with Opus model on the other hand was mind-blowing to me and made me change my mind on almost everything wrt my opinion of LLMs for coding. You still need to grow the skill of how to build the context and f…

So what happens when someone calls in and the "AI" answers (because the receptionist has been fired and replaced by "AI"), and the caller asks to access some company record that should be private? Will the LLM always deny the request? Hint: no, not always.

There are so many flaws in your plan, I have no doubt that "AI" will ruin some companies that try to replace humans with a "tin can". LLMs are being inserted loosey-goosey into too many places by people that don't really understand the liability problems it creates. Because the LLM doesn't think, it doesn't have a job to protect, it doesn't have a family to feed. It can be gamed. It simply won't care.

The flaws in "AI" are already pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. It will only get more obvious the more LLMs get pushed into places they really do not belong.

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #181
Glyptodon wrote: post #143

I don't consider myself a 10x engineer. The number one thing that I've realized makes me more productive than other engineers at my company is thinking through system design and business needs with patterns that don't take badly written product tickets literally. What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. A…

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.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by assword »

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.

Remote is dead. They clawed it back as soon as they could. I’d argue it’s even hard to get a remote position now, then it was before COVID.
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