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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

#431

Post by ares623 »

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…

I'd be curious how skill atrophy affects engineers who use AI semi-exclusively for these trivial tasks.

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

#432

Post by rob_c »

zwnow wrote: post #80
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recent TEA app leak is a good example of vibe coding gone wrong Weren't there 2 or 3 dating apps that were launched before the "vibecoding" craze that went extremely popular and got extremely hacked weeks/months in? I also distinctly remember a social network having firebase global tokens on the clientside, also a few years ago.

So that's an excuse for AI getting it wrong? It should know better if its so much better.

LLMs are not meant to be infallible it's meant to be faster.

Repeat after me, token prediction is not intelligence.

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

#433

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#434

Post by rob_c »

bpt3 wrote: post #374
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an excuse, no. I agree it should be better. And it will get better. Just pointing out that some mistakes were systematically happening before vibecoding became a thing. We went from "this thing is a stochastic parrot that gives you poems and famous people styled text, but not much else" to "here's a fullstack app, it may have some security issues but otherwise it mainly works" in 2.5 years. People expect perfecti…

I thought the idea was that AI would make us collectively better off, not flood the zone with technical debt as if thousands of newly minted CS/bootcamp graduates were unleashed without any supervision. LLMs are still stochastic parrots, though highly impressive and occasionally useful ones. LLMs are not going to solve problems like "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case". AI mig…

> "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case".

Frankly I've seen LLMs answer better than people trained in security theatre so be very careful where you draw the line.

If you're trying to say they struggle with what they've not seen before. Yes, provided that what is new isn't within the phase space they've been trained over. Remember there's no photographs of cats riding dinosaurs but SD models can generate them.

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

#435

Post by nemomarx »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #293
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…

When I go to buy 2 bottles of milk I am never offered to get it for 1.x the price of one bottle. I don't see any way it is fair to deliver double and get just 1.5x, in a hypothetical scenario just for the sake of the discussion. The suggestion to work 50% of the time and relax, socialize and network the other 50% is way more reasonable, when possible (not in my case).

this is pedantry but isn't that literally what BOGO or similar coupons do? so you're probably offered it a lot

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

#436

Post by Quarrelsome »

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…

you're going to push that straight to production? Cmon man, its not the same thing, not by a long shot. That's a crap measure. I don't think we can even reliably measure 1x developer output which makes multiplying it even more nonsensical.

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

#437

Post by neutronicus »

echelon wrote: post #96
neutronicus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For languages that are statically typed, it's still better than the best IDE AST understanding. This is emphatically NOT my experience with a large C++ codebase.

I can't attest to C++, but we've got a large Rust monorepo, and it's magical. It expands match blocks against highly complex enums from different crates, then tab completes test cases after I write the first one. Sometimes even before that.

We may be at different levels of "large" (and "gnarly") - this code-base has existed in some form since 1985, through various automated translations Pascal -> C -> C++.

Just by virtue of Rust being relatively short-lived I would guess that your code base is modular enough to live inside reasonable context limits, and written following mostly standard practice.

One of the main files I work on is ~40k lines of code, and one of the main proprietary API headers I consume is ~40k lines of code.

My attempts at getting the models available to Copilot to author functions for me have often failed spectacularly - as in I can't even get it to generate edits at prescribed places in the source code, follow examples from prescribed places. And the hallucination issue is EXTREME when trying to use the big C API I alluded to.

That said Claude Code (which I don't have access to at work) has been pretty impressive (although not what I would call "magical") on personal C++ projects. I don't have Opus, though.

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

#438

Post by paulhodge »

samtp wrote: post #422
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.

Mainly working on a dev tool / SaaS app right now. The PII is user names & email.

On the security layer, I wrote that code mostly by hand, with some 'pair programming' with Claude to get the Oauth handling working.

When I have the agent working on tasks independently, it's usually working on feature-specific business logic in the API and frontend. For that work it has a lot of standard helper functions to read/write data for the current authenticated user. With that scaffolding it's harder (not impossible) for the bot to mess up.

It's definitely a concern though, I've been brainstorming some creative ways to add extra tests and more auditing to look out for security issues. Overall I think the key for extremely fast development is to have an extremely good testing strategy.

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

#439

Post by Quarrelsome »

tptacek wrote: post #381
coltonv wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

how much faster does an engine on rocket fuel go, than one not on rocket fuel?

The article in question[0] has the literal tag line:

> My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

how much saner is someone who isn't nuts to someone who is nuts? 10x saner? What do the specific numbers matter given you're not writing a paper?

You're enjoying the click bait benefits of using strong language and then acting offended when someone calls you out on it. Yes, maybe you didn't literally say "10x" but you said or quoted things in exactly that same ballpark and its worthy of a counter point like the OP has provided. They're both interesting articles with strong opinions that make the world a more interesting place so idk why you're trying to disown the strength with which you wrote your article.

[0] : https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

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

#440

Post by jirach08 »

zepolen wrote: post #329
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that makes Newton a 10x scientist. Really puts in perspective how utterly unrealistic it is to be looking to hire exclusively 10x programmers - the true 10x'ers are legends, not just regular devs who type a bit faster.

Newton was a 1000x

I'd argue he was 9.81x
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