Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newton was a 1000x
I'd argue he was 9.81x
I think it's more important to measure his changing contribution as a function of time.
Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
461–470 of 675 posts
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe to get an impression that they'd be performing like them - but not actually performing. It helps me being lazy because I have a rough expectation of what the outcome should be - and I can directly spot any corner cases or other issues the AI proposed solution has, and can either prompt it to fix that, or (more often) fix those parts myself. The bottom 20% may not have enough skill to spot that, and they'll prod…
I randomly stumbled across Tekwetu who've made a pretty good step-by-step example of coding with Claude Code, using MCPs, etc.[1]. None of the upsell or gushing. It's a pretty simple app with a backend, with a slightly complicated storage mechanism.
I was watching to learn how other devs are using Claude Code, as my first attempt I pretty quickly ran into a huge mess and was specifically looking for how to debug better with MCP.
The most striking thing is she keeps on having to stop it doing really stupid things. She slightly glosses over those points a little bit by saying things like "I roughly know what this should look like, and that's not quite right" or "I know that's the old way of installing TailwindCSS, I'll just show you how to install Context7", etc.
But in each 10 minute episodes (which have time skips while CC thinks) it happens at least twice. She has to bring her senior dev skills in, and it's only due to her skill that she can spot the problem in seconds flat.
And after watching much of it, though I skipped a few episodes at the end, I'm pretty certain I could have coded the same app quicker than she did without agentic AI, just using the old chat window AIs to bash out the React boilerplate and help me quickly scan the documentation for getting offline. The initial estimate of 18 days the AI came up with in the plan phase would only hold truye if you had to do it "properly".
I'm also certain she could have too.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erKHnjVQD1k
It's worth a watch if you're not doing agentic coding yet. There were points I was impressed with what she got it to do. The TDD section was quite impressive in many ways, though it immediately tried to cheat and she had to tell it to do it properly.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#463In 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…
Of course there is an upper limit for AI. There's an upper limit for humans too.
What you need is just boring project management. Have a proper spec, architecture and tasks split into manageable chunks with enough information to implement them.
Then you just start watching TV and say "implement github issue #42" to Claude and it'll get on with it.
But if you say "build me facebook" and expect a shippable product, you'll have a bad time.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the comment Simon! This is honestly the first one I've read where it feels like someone actually read the article. I'm totally open to the idea that some people, especially those working on the languages/tools that LLMs are good at, are indeed getting a 2x improvement in certain parts of their job.
Something I have realized about Hacked News is that most of the comments on any given article are from people who are responding to the headline without actually clicking through and reading it! This is particularly true for headlines like this one which stand alone as statements.
Humans have been hallucinating responses given a prompt long before chatgpt was a thing!
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#465Say 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…
However, in the first case you learned something which probably is useful when you want to change said app in any way or make another project...
Depends on how you learn.
For me it's 50-50 reading other people's code and getting a feel for the patterns and actually writing the code.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't consider myself a 2x engineer; my company tells me that by not paying me 2x vs my colleagues, even if I know (and others believe that too) I deliver more than 2x their output. Using AI will change nothing in this context.
Counter: you are looking at it wrong. You can get work done in 1/2 of the time it used to. Now you got 1/2 of the day to just mess around. Socialize or network. It’s not necessarily that you’re producing 2x.
This is the way.
I had a task to do a semi-complex UI addition, the whole week was allocated for that.
I sicked the corp approved Github Copilot with 4o and Claude 3.7 at it and it was done in an afternoon. It's ~95% functionally complete, but ugly as sin. (The model didn't understand our specific Tailwind classes)
Now I can spend the rest of the week on polish.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#467Earlier 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.
If you really need some, there are some links in another comment. Another one that was made me really wonder if I was missing the bus and makes 10x claims repeatedly is this YC podcast episode[1]. But again, I'm not trying to write a point by point counter of a specific article or video but a general narrative. If you want that for your article, Ludicity does a better job eviscerating your post than I ever could: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-arti...
I'm trying to write a piece to comfort those that feel anxious about the wave of articles telling them they aren't good enough, that they are "standing still", as you say in your article. That they are crazy. Your article may not say the word 10x, but it makes something extremely clear: you believe some developers are sitting still and others are sipping rocket fuel. You believe AI skeptics are crazy. Thus, your article is extremely natural to cite when talking about the origin of this post.
You can keep being mad at me for not providing a detailed target list, I said several times that that's not what the point of this is. You can keep refusing to actually elaborate on how you use AI day to day and solve its problems. That's fine. I don't care. I care a lot more to talk about the people who are actually engaging with me (such as your friend) and helping me to understand what they are doing. Right now, if you're going to keep not actually contributing to the conversation, you're just kinda being a salty guy with an almost unfathomable 408,000 karma going through every HN thread every single day and making hot takes.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#468There’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…
Speaking of irony... did ChatGPT help you write this comment?
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think even claims of 2-5x are highly suspect. It would imply that if your team is using AI then all else equal they accomplish 2-5 times as much in a quarter. I don't know about you but I'm certainly not seeing this and most people on my team use AI. [And to those saying we're using it wrong... well I can't argue with something that's not falsifiable]
My company is all in on LLMs and honestly the improvement seems to be like 0.9x to 1.2x depending on the project. None of them are moving at break neck speed and many projects are just as bogged down by complexity as ever. Pretty big (3000+) company with a large mature codebase in multiple languages. For god knows how much money spent on it
Once a company gets to a certain size, they no longer optimise for product development, instead they optimise for risk mitigation. A lot of processes will be put in place with the sole purpose of slowing down code development.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#470There’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…
Speaking of irony... did ChatGPT help you write this comment?
It doesn't read to me like AI content. It's also against HN guidelines to randomly suggest comments are AI generated.