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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

#401

Post by kasey_junk »

claytongulick wrote: post #312
kasey_junk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a commentary on one of the things I perceive as a flaw with LLMs, not you. One of the most valuable qualities of humans is laziness. We're constantly seeking efficiency gains, because who wants to carry buckets of water, or take laundry down to the river? Skilled developers excel at this. They are "lazy" when they code - they plan for the future, they construct code in a way that will make their life better, and…

Now, go back and contemplate what my feedback means if I am well versed on Larry Wall-isms.

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

#403

Post by necovek »

bongodongobob wrote: post #250
necovek wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first red flag there is "2x their output". You can find many an anecdote where a good engineer produced better solution in fewer lines of code (or sometimes, by removing code — the holy grail). So always aim for outcomes , not output :) At my company, we did promote people quickly enough that they are now close to double their salaries when they started a year or so ago, due to their added value as engineers in t…

No one said anything about lines of code. I would assume output here means features completed, tickets knocked out, tasks completed etc.

Even so, tickets munched out or tasks completed is still "output" — sometimes you could provide more value by avoiding tickets that are not bringing benefits to customers or business, solving things customers need and not what they think they need, suggesting solutions which are 5% of work yet provide 90% of the value, etc.

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

#404

Post by smrtinsert »

zahlman wrote: post #289
Izkata wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x sounds nice which is probably why it stuck, but it came from actual research which found the difference was larger than 10x - but also they were measuring between best and worst, not best and average as it's used nowadays. https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...

>but also they were measuring between best and worst, not best and average as it's used nowadays. Depending on the environment, I can imagine the worst devs being net negative.

And they get promoted too. Multiple times I've seen people get promoted for decisions that doom the company years later. Considering all the various departments and people that go into supporting these net negative engineers, more people are net negative than they think.

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

#405

Post by JoshuaDavid »

tptacek wrote: post #125
BoxFour wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still think complaining about "hallucination" is a pretty big "tell". The conversation around LLMs is so polarized. Either they’re dismissed as entirely useless, or they’re framed as an imminent replacement for software developers altogether. Hallucinations are worth talking about! Just yesterday, for example, Claude 4 Sonnet confidently told me Godbolt was wrong wrt how clang would compile something (it wasn’t).…

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…

Are we using the same LLMs? I absolutely see cases of "hallucination" behavior when I'm invoking an LLM (usually sonnet 4) in a loop of "1 generate code, 2 run linter, 3 run tests, 4 goto 1 if 2 or 3 failed".

Usually, such a loop just works. In the cases where it doesn't, often it's because the LLM decided that it would be convenient if some method existed, and therefore that method exists, and then the LLM tries to call that method and fails in the linting step, decides that it is the linter that is wrong, and changes the linter configuration (or fails in the test step, and updates the tests). If in this loop I automatically revert all test and linter config changes before running tests, the LLM will receive the test output and report that the tests passed, and end the loop if it has control (or get caught in a failure spiral if the scaffold automatically continues until tests pass).

It's not an extremely common failure mode, as it generally only happens when you give the LLM a problem where it's both automatically verifiable and too hard for that LLM. But it does happen, and I do think "hallucination" is an adequate term for the phenomenon (though perhaps "confabulation" would be better).

Aside:

> I can't imagine an agent being given permission to iterate Terraform

Localstack is great and I have absolutely given an LLM free rein over terraform config pointed at localstack. It has generally worked fine and written the same tf I would have written, but much faster.

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

#406

Post by breakingwalls »

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…

This, I agree to this 100%. I was able to get at least 2 apps, 2 SAAS products out by pairing up with AI. I was able to learn this as I go and get an app running in the matter of hours than months. Great for prototype to production. -> learn-> fix -> ship -> learn more -> fix things -> ship more.

That being said, I am a generalist with 10+ years of experience and can spot the good parts from bad parts and can wear many hats. Sure, I do not know everything, but, hey did I know everything when AI was not there? I took help from SO, Reddit and other places. Now, I go to AI, see if it makes sense, apply the fix, learn and move on.

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

#407

Post by JoshuaDavid »

gspencley wrote: post #320
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…

> making tests What I'm about to discuss is about me, not you. I have no idea what kind of systems you build, what your codebase looks like, use case, business requirements etc. etc. etc. So it is possible writing tests is a great application for LLMs for you. In my day to day work... I wish that developers where I work would stop using LLMs to write tests. The most typical problem with LLM-generated tests on the cod…

There are some patterns you can use that help a bit with this problem. Lowest hanging fruit is to tell the LLM that its tests should test only through public interfaces where possible. Next after that is to add a "check if any non-public interfaces were used in places where a public interface exposes the same functionality the not-yet-committed tests - if so, rewrite tests to use only publicly exposed interfaces" step to the workflow. You could likely also add linter rules, though sometimes you genuinely need to test something like error conditions that can't reasonably be tested only through public interfaces.

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

#408

Post by abelanger »

One thing I've been wondering recently: has the experience of using software (specifically web apps) been getting better? It seems like a natural extension of significantly increased productivity would lead to fewer buggy websites and apps, more intuitive UIs, etc.

Linear was a very early-stage product I tested a few months after their launch where I was genuinely blown away by the polish and experience relative to their team size. That was in 2020, pre-LLMs.

I have yet to see an equally polished and impressive early-stage product in the past few years, despite claims of 10x productivity.

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

#409

Post by jprokay13 »

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…

At first I thought becoming “10x” meant outputting 10x as much code. Now that I’m using Claude more as an expensive rubber duck, I’m hoping that I spend more time defining the fundamentals correctly that will lead to a large improvement in outcomes in the long run.

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

#410

Post by gmm1990 »

itissid wrote: post #360

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…

Extremely anecdotal but all I keep seeing is relatively stable services (the google one comes to mind) having major outages. I assume its not AI related or directly ai related at least, but you'd think these outages would be less common if AI was adding so much value.
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