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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

#471

Post by jjmarr »

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…

"Software engineering" will become vibe fixing.

There's many jobs that can be eliminated with software, but haven't because managers don't want to hire SWEs without proven value. I don't think HN realizes how big that market is.

With AI, the managers will replace their employees with a bunch of code they don't understand, watch that code fail in 3 years, and have to hire SWEs to fix it.

I'd bet those jobs will outnumber the ones initially eliminated by having non-technical people deliver the first iteration.

Many of those jobs will be high-skill/impact because they are necessarily focused on fixing stuff AI can't understand.

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

#472

Post by paulhodge »

samtp wrote: post #441
paulhodge wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No this app isn't launched yet. And yeah, customer data is definitely a very valid thing to be concerned about.

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

#473

Post by mikestorrent »

jdelman wrote: post #468
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…

Speaking of irony... did ChatGPT help you write this comment?

Doesn't read like it to me. It has "reddit spacing", but enough information density and colloquialism that it's probably a person.

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

#474

Post by tptacek »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #458
tptacek wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "t…

No. There's all sorts of software engineering craft that usually has no place on the job site; for instance, there's a huge amount of craft in learning pure-functional languages like Haskell, but nobody freaks out when their teams decide people can't randomly write Haskell code instead of the Python and Rust everyone else is writing. You're extrapolating because you're trying to defend your point, but the point you're trying to make is that I meant to communicate something in my own article that I not only never said, but also find repellant.

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

#475

Post by rhines »

torginus wrote: post #459
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…

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…

The comparison to art is apt. Generated art gets the job done for most people. It's good enough. Maybe it's derivative, maybe there are small inaccuracies, but it is available instantly for free and that's what matters most. Same with code, to many people.

And the knock-on effect is that there is less menial work. Artists are commissioned less for the local fair, their friend's D&D character portrait, etc. Programmers find less work building websites for small businesses, fixing broken widgets, etc.

I wonder if this will result in fewer experts, or less capable ones. As we lose the jobs that were previously used to hone our skills will people go out of their way to train themselves for free or will we just regress?

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

#476

Post by belter »

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…

You miss the fundamental constraint. The bottleneck in software development was never typing speed or generation, but verification and understanding.

Even if LLMs worked perfectly without hallucinations (they don't and might never), a conscientious developer must still comprehend every line before shipping it. You can't review and understand code 10x faster just because an LLM generated it.

In fact, reviewing generated code often takes longer because you're reverse-engineering implicit assumptions rather than implementing explicit intentions.

The "10x productivity" narrative only works if you either:

- Are not actually reviewing the output properly

or

- Are working on trivial code where correctness doesn't matter.

Real software engineering, where bugs have consequences, remains bottlenecked by human cognitive bandwidth, not code generation speed. LLMs shifted the work from writing to reviewing, and that's often a net negative for productivity.

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

#477

Post by willismichael »

greatwhitenorth wrote: post #271
adocomplete wrote: post #243

AI is making me 100x productive in some tasks, and 2-4x in others, and 0x in some. Knowing which tasks AI is great at and delegating is like 95% of the battle.

You're doing it wrong. AI is making me 2375600x productive in all tasks.

Including writing comments on HN.

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

#478

Post by wikibob »

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…

AI slop.

- it’s not just X, it’s Y

- emdashes everywhere

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

#479

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

rhines wrote: post #475
torginus wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The comparison to art is apt. Generated art gets the job done for most people. It's good enough. Maybe it's derivative, maybe there are small inaccuracies, but it is available instantly for free and that's what matters most. Same with code, to many people. And the knock-on effect is that there is less menial work. Artists are commissioned less for the local fair, their friend's D&D character portrait, etc. Programmer…

Shoe cobblers were once a large respected career of expert professionals. They still exist.

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

#480

Post by jjmarr »

dehugger wrote: post #470
jdelman wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The use of en dashes and short staccato sentences for rhetorical flourishes are a giveaway. AI writes like a LinkedIn post.

> Why? Because LLMs don’t just autocomplete. They generate. And in doing so, they challenge our identity, not just our workflows.

is what raised flags in my head. Rather than explain the difference between glorified autocompletion and generation, the post assumes there is a difference then uses florid prose to hammer in the point it didn't prove.

I've heard the paragraph "why? Because X. Which is not Y. And abcdefg" a hundred times. Deepseek uses it on me every time I ask a question.

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