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

colton.dev

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

#441

Post by samtp »

paulhodge wrote: post #438
samtp wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I appreciate the helpful reply, honestly. One other question - are people currently using the app?

I think where I've become very hesitant is a lot of the programs that I touch has customer data belonging to clients with pretty hard-nosed legal teams. So it's quite difficult for me to imagine not reviewing the production code by hand.

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

#442

Post by [deleted] »

coltonv wrote: post #426
kasey_junk wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#443

Post by Gud »

megaloblasto wrote: post #103

I thought this would be another AI hate article, but it made some great points. One thing that AI has helped me with is finding pesky bugs. I mainly work on numerical simulations. At one point I was stuck for almost a week trying to figure out why my simulation was acting so strange. Finally I pulled up chatgpt, put some of my files into the context and wrote a prompt explaining the strange behavior and what I though…

Indeed. As a (mostly) hobbyist programmer LLMs have been a godsend for those late night coding sessions when the brain fog is thick.

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

#444

Post by gopher_space »

logicchains wrote: post #154
hyperbovine wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (I think) a reference to the 10x engineer, another myth of which I have always been highly dubious ( https://www.simplethread.com/the-10x-programmer-myth/ ).

You don't believe Fabrice Bellard exists?

He doesn't believe there are hundreds of Fabrice Bellard clones who think working at your company wouldn't be a waste of their time. The myth might be that thinking about 10X is useful in any sense. You can't plan around one gracing you with their presence and you won't be able to retain them when they do.

Thinking about it personally, a 10X label means I'm supposedly the smartest person in the room and that I'm earning 1/10th what I should be. Both of those are huge negatives.

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

#446

Post by tptacek »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #439
tptacek wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

I'm not complaining about "strong language", I'm saying: my post didn't say anything about "10x developers", and was just cited to me as the source of this post's claims about 10x'ing.

I'm not offended at all. I'm saying: no, I'm not a valid cite for that idea. If the author wants to come back and say "10x developer", a term they used twenty five times in this piece, was just a rhetorical flourish, something they conjured up themselves in their head, that's great! That would resolve this small dispute neatly. Unfortunately: you can't speak for them.

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

#447

Post by voxleone »

There’s something ironic here. For decades, we dreamed of semi-automating software development. CASE tools, UML, and IDEs all promised higher-level abstractions that would "let us focus on the real logic."

Now that LLMs have actually fulfilled that dream — albeit by totally different means — many devs feel anxious, even threatened. Why? Because LLMs don’t just autocomplete. They generate. And in doing so, they challenge our identity, not just our workflows.

I think Colton’s article nails the emotional side of this: imposter syndrome isn’t about the actual 10x productivity (which mostly isn't real), it’s about the perception that you’re falling behind. Meanwhile, this perception is fueled by a shift in what “software engineering” looks like.

LLMs are effectively the ultimate CASE tools — but they arrived faster, messier, and more disruptively than expected. They don’t require formal models or diagrams. They leap straight from natural language to executable code. That’s exciting and unnerving. It collapses the old rites of passage. It gives power to people who don’t speak the “sacred language” of software. And it forces a lot of engineers to ask: What am I actually doing now?

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

#448

Post by jg0r3 »

Hammershaft wrote: post #395
jcelerier wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That also wildly exceeds my experience. The documentation + code generated would be enlightening!

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

#449

Post by kasey_junk »

coltonv wrote: post #426
kasey_junk wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think maybe this is another disconnect. A lot of the advantage I get does not come from the agent doing things faster than me, though for most tasks it certainly can.

A lot of the advantage is that it can make forward progress when I can’t. I can check to see if an agent is stuck, and sometimes reprompt it, in the downtime between meetings or after lunch before I start whatever deep thinking session I need to do. That’s pure time recovered for me. I wouldn’t have finished _any_ work with that time previously.

I don’t need to optimize my time around babysitting the agent. I can do that in the margins. Watching the agents is low context work. That adds the capability to generate working solutions during times that was previously barred from that.

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

#450

Post by coltonv »

voxleone wrote: post #447

There’s something ironic here. For decades, we dreamed of semi-automating software development. CASE tools, UML, and IDEs all promised higher-level abstractions that would "let us focus on the real logic." Now that LLMs have actually fulfilled that dream — albeit by totally different means — many devs feel anxious, even threatened. Why? Because LLMs don’t just autocomplete. They generate. And in doing so, they challe…

Very interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!
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