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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

#391

Post by emseetech »

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…

| I think that's an under-estimation

I'm not sure it is and I'll take it a step further:

Over the course of development, efficiency gains trend towards zero.

AI has a better case for increasing surface area (what an engineer is capable of working on) and effectiveness, but efficiency is a mirage.

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

#392

Post by kasey_junk »

coltonv wrote: post #363
kasey_junk wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that quote in Thomas’ blog can be attributed to me. I’ve at least said something near enough to him that I don’t mind claiming it. I _never_ made the claim that you could call that 10x productivity improvement. I’m hesitant to categorize productivity in software in numeric terms as it’s such a nuanced concept. But I’ll stand by my impression that a developer using ai tools will generate code at a perceptibl…

Appreciate the comment! > I mentioned in another comment the major flaw in your productivity calculation, is that you aren’t accounting for the work that wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise. That’s where my improvements are almost universally coming from. I can improve the codebase in ways that weren’t justifiable before in places that do not suffer from the coordination costs you rightly point out. I'm a bit confuse…

> but getting corrected after tests are run, whereas my agents typically get stuck in these write-and-test loops

This maybe a definition problem then. I don’t think “the agent did a dumb thing that it can’t reason out of” is a hallucination. To me a hallucination is a pretty specific failure mode, it invents something that doesn’t exist. Models still do that for me but the build test loop sets them aright on that nearly perfectly. So I guess the model is still hallucinating but the agent isn’t so the output is unimpacted. So I don’t care.

For the agent is dumb scenario, I aggressively delete and reprompt. This is something I’ve actually gotten much better at with time and experience, both so it doesn’t happen often and I can course correct quickly. I find it works nearly as well for teaching me about the problem domain as my own mistakes do but is much faster to get to.

But if I were going to be pithy. Aggressively deleting work output from an agent is part of their value proposition. They don’t get offended and they don’t need explanations why. Of course they don’t learn well either, that’s on you.

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

#393

Post by AtNightWeCode »

When I asked ChatGPT about this topic it claimed that AI can make a software developer up to about 50% more productive on average. Sounds more reasonable to me. I often write custom tools to generate code. Sometimes when stars are aligned I get that 100x feeling. And sometimes I regret it so hard a couple of years later.

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

#394

Post by bluefirebrand »

alexchantavy wrote: post #350
hathawsh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Me, typing into a search engine, a few years ago: "Postgres CTE tutorial" Me, typing into any AI engine, in 2025: "Here is my schema and query; optimize the query using CTEs and anything else you think might improve performance and readability"

And nowadays if you type that into a search engine you may be overwhelmed with ads or articles of varying quality that you'll need to read and deeply understand to adapt to your use-case.

> you'll need to read and deeply understand to adapt to your use-case

This sort of implies you are not reading and deeply understanding your LLM output, doesn't it?

I am pretty strongly against that behavior

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

#395

Post by Hammershaft »

jcelerier wrote: post #286
Uehreka wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree. The current state of coding AIs is “a level 2 product manager who is a world class biker balancing on a unicycle trying to explain a concept in French to a Spanish genius who is only 4 years old.” I’m not going to explain what I mean, but if you’ve used Qwen Code you understand.

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

That exceeds my expectations! I'm willing to change my mind, do you have any cool examples i should look at?

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

#396

Post by bluefirebrand »

mgfist wrote: post #239
bluefirebrand wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

Yes. It's so dramatically better it's not even funny. It's not that information doesn't exist out there, it's more that an LLM can give it to you in a few seconds and it's tailored to your specific situation. The second part is especially helpful if the internet answer is 95% correct but is missing something specific to you that ends up taking you 20 minutes to figure out.

> that ends up taking you 20 minutes to figure out

That 20 minutes, repeated over and over over the course of a career, is the difference between being a master versus being an amateur

You should value it, even if your employer doesn't.

Your employer would likely churn you into ground beef if there was a financial incentive to, never forget that

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

#397

Post by bluefirebrand »

antonvs wrote: post #272
bluefirebrand wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

Are you boycotting AI or something? If you try it yourself you'll soon find out that the answer is a very obvious yes. You don't need a paid plan to benefit from that kind of assistance, either.

> Are you boycotting AI or something?

At this point I am close to deciding to fully boycott it yes

> If you try it yourself you'll soon find out that the answer is a very obvious yes

I have tried plenty over the years, every time a new model releases and the hype cycle fires up again I look in to see if it is any better

I try to use it a couple of weeks, decide it is overrated and stop. Yes it is improving. No it is not good enough for me to trust

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

#398

Post by arrowsmith »

lordnacho wrote: post #236

I'm getting a lot of side-quest productivity out of AI. There's always a bunch of things I could do, but they are tedious. Yet they are still things I wish I could get done. Those kinds of things AI is fantastic at. Building a mock, making tests, abstracting a few things into libraries, documentation. So it's not like I'm delivering features in one day that would have taken two weeks. But I am delivering features in…

I like that "side quests" framing.

For much of what I build with AI, I'm not saving two weeks. I'm saving infinity weeks — if LLMs didn't exist I would have never built this tool in the first place.

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

#399

Post by adocomplete »

zahlman wrote: post #292
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?

Not preventing, but def wasting time trying to do something that I think it's able to do, but isn't.

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

#400

Post by platevoltage »

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…

>I'd expect it to work like a very junior programmer, but it works like a very drunk senior programmer that isn't listening to you very well at all.

Best analogy I've ever heard and it's completely accurate. Now, back to work debugging and finishing a vibe coded application I'm being paid to work on.

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