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

colton.dev

451–460 of 675 posts

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

#451

I've tested Gemini Pro 2.5 yesterday with a function I had troubles with. It wasn't something I can't do, just one of those things easy to get wrong that I postponed because I lacked focus that day due to a heat wave. The AI spit out a perfect function with working tests after the first prompt. Now I don't want to sound like a doomsayer but it appears to me that application programming and corresponding software comp…

You just said we won’t need to develop apps anymore.. What will be the AI need to create at all?

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

#452
post #420

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…

> 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.

People share this stuff all the time. Kenton Varda published a whole walkthrough[1], prompts and all. Stories about people's personal LLM workflows have been on the front page here repeatedly over the last few months.

What people aren't doing is proving to you that their workflows work as well as they say they do. You want proof, you can DM people for their rate card and see what that costs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166

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

#453
post #288

Words of wisdom: There is no secret herbal medicine that prevents all disease sitting out in the open if you just follow the right Facebook groups. There is no AI coding revolution available if you just start vibing. You are not missing anything. Trust yourself. You are enough. Oh, and don't scroll LinkedIn. Or Twitter. Ever.

Or shit you know what… Hacker News for that matter…

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

#454
as someone who’s been coding most of his entire life I have to admit.. LLMs kind of killed the magic of programming for me… It’s not as cool when I create something with the LLM.. It just feels like you had someone else do the work for you… It’s sad kind of…

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

#456

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…

> They don’t require formal models or diagrams.

Nor do they produce those (do they?). That is what I would like to see. Formal models and diagrams are not needed to produce code. Their point is that they allow us to understand code and to formalize what we want it to do. That's what I'm hoping AI could do for me.

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

#457

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…

It kills the magic of coding for sure. The thing is. Now with everyone doing it, you get a ton of slop. Computing’s become saturated as hell. We don’t even need more code as it is. Before LLMs you could pretty much find what you needed on github… Now it’s even worse.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

10x is a meme in our industry that relates to developer productivity and I think it well reflects the sort of productivity gain that someone would be "nuts" to be skeptical about. You might not have specifically said "10x" but I imagine many people left your article believing that agentic AI is the "next 10x" productivity boost.

They used it 25 times in their piece and in your piece stated that being interested in "the craft" is something people should do in their own time from now on. Strongly implying, if not outright stating; that the processes and practices we've refined for the past 70 years of software engineering need to move aside for the next hotness that has only been out for 6 months. Sure you never said "10x", but to me it read entirely like you're doing the "10x" dance. It was a good article and it definitely has inspired me to check it out.

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

#459

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…

I now understand what artists felt when seeing stable diffusion images - AI code is often just wrong - not in the moral sense, but it contains tons of bugs, weirdness, excess and peculiarities you'd never be happy to see in a real code base. Often getting rid of all of this, takes comparable amount of time as doing the job in the first place.

Now I can always switch to a different model, increase the context, prompt better etc. but I still feel that actual good quality AI code is just out of arms reach, or when something clicks, and the AI magically starts producing exactly what I want, that magic doesn't last.

Like with stable diffusion, people who don't care as much or aren't knowledgeable enough to know better, just don't get what's wrong with this.

A week ago, I received a bug ticket claiming one of the internal libs i wrote didn't work. I checked out the reporter's code, which was full of weird issues (like the debugger not working and the typescript being full of red squiggles), and my lib crashed somewhere in the middle, in some esoteric minified js.

When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.

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

#460
post #145
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…

My biggest takeaway from using AI is that (1) for my day job, it doesn't make me super productive with creation, but it does help with discovery, learning, getting myself unstuck, and writing tedious code. (2) however, the biggest unlock is it makes working on side projects __immensely__ easier. Before AI I was always too tired to spend significant time on side projects. Now, I can see my ideas come to life (albeit w…

#2 is the reason I keep paying for Claude Code Pro.

For 20 a month I can get my stupid tool and utility ideas from "it would be cool if I could..." to actual "works well enough for me" -tools in an evening - while I watch my shows at the same time.

After a day at work I don't have the energy to start digging through, say, OpenWeather's latest 3.0 API and its nuances and how I can refactor my old code to use the new API.

Claude did it in maybe one episode of What We Do in the Shadows :D I have a hook that makes my computer beep when Claude is done or pauses for a question, so I can get back, check what it did and poke it forward.

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