Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by spopejoy » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:07 PM UTC

docmars wrote: post #330

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…

With something like Devin, where it integrates directly with your repo and generates documentation based on your project(s), it's much more productive to use as an agent. I can delegate like 4-5 small tasks that would normally take me a full day or two (or three) of context switching and mental preparation, and knock them out in less than a day because it did 50-80% of the work, leaving only a few fixes or small pivo…

> Being able to refactor things with only a couple sentences is remarkably fast.

I'm curious, this is js/ts? Asking because depending on the lang, good old machine refactoring is either amazeballs (Java + IDE) or non-existent (Haskell).

I'm not js/ts so I don't know what the state of machine refactoring is in VS code ... But if it's as good as Java then "a couple of sentences" is quite slow compared to a keystroke or a quick dialog box with completion of symbol names.

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

#422

Post by samtp » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

paulhodge wrote: post #216

I've had days where it really does feel like 5x or 10x... Here's what the 5x to 10x flow looks like: 1. Plan out the tasks (maybe with the help of AI) 2. Open a Git worktree, launch Claude Code in the worktree, give it the task, let it work. It gets instructions to push to a Github pull request when it's done. Claude gets to work. It has access to a whole bunch of local tools, test suites, and lots of documentation.…

What type of software are you building with this workflow? Does it handle PII, need data to be exact, or have any security implications?

Because I might just not have a great imagination, but it's very hard for me to see how you basically automate the review process on anything that is business critical or has legal risks.

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

#423

Post by jan_g » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #340

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…

> engineers that really know how to use this stuff effectively I guess this is still the "caveat" that can keep the hype hopes going. But I've found at a team velocity level, with our teams, where everyone is actively using agentic coding like Claude Code on the daily, we actually didn't see an increase in team velocity yet. I'm curious to hear anecdotal from other teams, has your team seen velocity increase since it…

Same here. I have a colleague that is completely enamored with these agents. Uses them for everything he can, not just coding. Commit messages, opening PRs, Linear tickets, etc. Basically, he uses agents for everything he can. But the productivity gain is just not there. He's about as fast or rather as slow as he was before. And to a degree I think this goes for the whole team. It's the oxymoron of AI: more code, more documentation, more text, more of everything generated than ever, but the effect is that this means more complexity, more PRs to review, more bugs, more stuff to know and understand, ... We are all still learning how to use these agents effectively. And the particular developer's effect can and does multiply as everything else with GenAI. Was he a bit sloppy before, not covering various edge-cases and used quick-and-dirty shortcuts? Then this remains true for the code he produces using agents. And to those, who claim that "by using more agents I will gain 10x productivity" I say please read a certain book about how just adding developers to a project makes it even more delayed. The resemblance of team/project leadership -> developers dynamic is truly uncanny.

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

#424

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:16 PM UTC

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

Assuming there aren't tricky concurrency issues and the documentation makes sense (you know what registers to set to configure and otherwise work the device,) device drivers are the easiest thing in the world to code.

There's the old trope that systems programmers are smarter than applications programmers but SWE-Bench puts the lie to that. Sure, SWE-Bench problems are all in the language of software, applications programmers take badly specified tickets in the language of product managers, testers and end users and have to turn that into the language of SWE-Bench to get things done. I am not that impressed with 65% performance on SWE-Bench because those are not the kind of tickets that I have to resolve at work, but rather at work if I want to use AI to help maintain a large codebase I need to break the work down into that kind of ticket.

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

#425

Post by Quarrelsome » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:24 PM UTC

skadamou wrote: post #278

sureglymop wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do also believe that those who are often looked at or referred to as 10x engineers will maybe only see a marginal productivity increase. The smartest programmer I know is so impressive mainly for two reasons: first, he seems to have just an otherworldly memory and seems to kind of have absolutely every little feature and detail of the programming languages he uses memorized. Second, his real power is really in cogn…

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.

I think its more effective at lowering the floor. The amount of people that can't code at all but can now slap something together makes it a huge step forward. Albeit one that mostly steps on a pile of dogshit after it hits any sort of production reality.

Its like Wordpress all over again but with people even less able to code. There's going to be vast amounts of opportunities for people to get into the industry via this route but its not going to be a very nice route for many of them. Lots of people who understand software even less than c-suite holding the purse-strings.

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

#426

Post by coltonv » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #392

coltonv wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nea…

What I'm saying is that the model will get into one of these loops where it needs to be killed, and I'll look at some of the intermediate states and the reasons for failure and they are because it hallucinated things, ran tests, got an error. Does that make sense?

Deleting and re-prompting is fine. I do that too. But even one cycle of that often means the whole prompting exercise takes me longer than if I just wrote the code myself.

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

#427

Post by rob_c » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:26 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #39

rob_c wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's disingenuous or naive. Almost nobody decides to expressly highlight the section of code (or whole files generated by ai) they just get on with the job when there's real deadlines and it's not about coding for the sake of the art form...

If the generated implementation is not good, you're trading short-term "getting on with the job" and "real deadlines" for mid-to-long-term slowdown and missed deadlines. In other words, it matters whether the AI is creating technical debt.

If you're creating technical debt, you're creating technical debt.

That has nothing to do with AI/LLMs.

If you can't understand what the tool spits out either; learn, throw it away, or get it to make something you can understand.

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

#428

Post by coltonv » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:28 PM UTC

quaintdev wrote: post #388

Interesting that title of this post was changed. I think I have seen this happening 2nd time now. It seems Hacker News does not favor AI negative narratives.

Has happened to me before. It seems they change anything that has a negative connotation to try to take something more positive out of it. I don't love that they do that without asking or confirming with the author. But this title is also fine with me. I actually thought about naming it "Curing your AI 10x Imposter Syndrome", but it felt like a stretch that someone would understand what the content would be about.

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

#429

Post by Quarrelsome » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:29 PM UTC

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…

might it not be the other way round? For all we know its mediocre devs who are relishing the prospect of doing jack shit all day and still being able to submit some auto generated PRs. Being "amazed" at what it produces when someone with higher standards might be less than amazed.

I find it impossible to work out who to trust on the subject, given that I'm not working directly with them, so remain entirely on the fence.

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

#430

Post by rob_c » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 8:30 PM UTC

ajaisibsbz wrote: post #156

rob_c wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dont use ai code generation tools Then unfortunately you're leaving yourself at a serious disadvantage. Good for you if you're able to live without a calculator, but frankly the automated tool is faster and leaves you less exhausted so you should be taking advantage of it.

Is typing speed a bottle neck for people? Because otherwise you’re offloading thinking to the LLM. Unless you can understand code faster than you can write it (which I’ve never experienced - best case scenario I can understand as fast as I read). As a junior I used to think it was ok to spend much less time on the review than the writing, but unless the author has diligently detailed their entire process a good revie…

> Is typing speed a bottle neck for people?

Yes, if it isn't your being overpaid in the view of a lot of people. Step out of the way and let an expert use the keyboard.

How can you not read and understand code but spend time writing it? That's bad code in that situation.

Source: try working with assembly and binary objects only which really do require working out what's going on. Code is meant to be human readable remember...