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…
Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
451–460 of 675 posts
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#452Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#453Words 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.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#454Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#455Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#456There’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…
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
#457There’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…
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#458Earlier 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…
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
#459There’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…
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
#460I 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…
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.