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

411–420 of 675 posts

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

#411

Post by alfiedotwtf »

ffsm8 wrote: post #252
simonw wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should expect most companies to let people go at staggering numbers, with only small amounts of highly skilled people left to administer the agents I don't buy that. The linked article makes a solid argument for why that's not likely to happen: agentic loop coding tools like Claude Code can speed up the "writing code and getting it working" piece, but the software development lifecycle has so much other work be…

And I completely agree with that! These are exactly the people that are going to stay, medium term. Let's explore a fictional example that somewhat resembles my, and I suspect a lot of peoples current dayjob. A Micro-Service architecture, each team administers 5-10 services and the whole application, which is once again only a small part of the platform as a whole is developed by maybe 100-200 devs. So something like…

Let’s extreme this further - why would the company exist in the first place? The customers of said company pay them because they don’t do the service themselves - but in the future when it’s laughably easy to vibe code anything your heart desires, their customers will just build the service themselves that they used to outsource!

tl;dr: in the future when vibe coding works 100% of the time, logically the only companies that will exist are the ones that have processes that AI can’t do, because all the other parts of the supply chain can all be done in-house

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

#412

Post by giantg2 »

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 completely agree. I saw the claims about 30% increase in dev productivity a while ago and thought how is that possible when most of my job consists of meetings, SARs, threat modeling, etc.

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

#413

Post by EGreg »

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…

“10x? That’s crazy talk. I’m only 5x more productive, let’s be accurate sirs”

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

#414

Post by alphazard »

Scarblac wrote: post #85
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…

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.

The point is that good software engineers are good at doing the "hard part". So good that they have a backlog of "trivial" typing tasks. In a well functioning organization they would hand off the backlog of trivial parts to less experienced engineers, who might be herded by a manager. Now we don't need the less experienced engineers or the manager to herd them.

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

#415

Post by ffsm8 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #411
ffsm8 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I completely agree with that! These are exactly the people that are going to stay, medium term. Let's explore a fictional example that somewhat resembles my, and I suspect a lot of peoples current dayjob. A Micro-Service architecture, each team administers 5-10 services and the whole application, which is once again only a small part of the platform as a whole is developed by maybe 100-200 devs. So something like…

Let’s extreme this further - why would the company exist in the first place? The customers of said company pay them because they don’t do the service themselves - but in the future when it’s laughably easy to vibe code anything your heart desires, their customers will just build the service themselves that they used to outsource! tl;dr: in the future when vibe coding works 100% of the time, logically the only compani…

That scenario is a lot further out compared to what I was talking about.

It's conceivable that thats going to happen, eventually. but that'd likely require models a lot more advanced to what we have now.

The agent approach with lead devs administering and merging the code the agents made is feasible with today's models. The missing part is the tooling around the models and the development practices that that standardizes this workflow.

That's what I'd expect to take around 5 yrs to settle.

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

#416

Post by samtp »

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…

> until I actually started to use some in the same toy project

Thats the key right there. Try to use it in a project that handles PII, needs data to be exact, or has many dependencies/libraries and needs to not break for critical business functions.

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

#417

Post by wglb »

symfrog wrote: post #6
jf22 wrote: post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Do you have a link to some of the code that you have produced using this approach? I am yet to see a public or private repo with non-trivial generated code that is not fundamentally flawed.

https://github.com/wglb/gemini-chat Almost entirely generated by gemini based on my english language description. Several rounds with me adding requirements.

(edit)

I asked it to generate a changelog: https://github.com/wglb/gemini-chat/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

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

#418

Post by wglb »

drgiggles wrote: post #4
jf22 wrote: post #2

> What LLMs produce is often broken, hallucinated, or below codebase standards. With enough rules and good prompting this is not true. The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand. The reason the code is better all the extra polish and gold plating is essentially free. Everything I generate comes out commented great error handling, logging, SOLID, and united tested using established patterns in the…

Easily 99% of comments generated by LLMs are useless.

Not what I have found with gemini.

What is particularly useful is the comments about reasoning about new code added at my request.

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

#419

Post by samtp »

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…

But at the same time you basically outsourced your brain and any learning that would come from the exercise. So while you now have an app, you've experienced close to 0 learning or growth along the way.

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

#420

Post by samtp »

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…

> One thing that has been frustrating me is that people rarely share their workflows after making big claims

Good luck ever getting that. I've asked that about a dozen times on here from people making these claims and have never received a response. And I'm genuinely curious as well, so I will continue asking.

Post reply on HN