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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

#511

Post by nudgeOrnurture »

mavamaarten wrote: post #101
simonw wrote: 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…

Yeah. I just need to babysit it too much. Take copilot, it gives good suggestions and blows me away sometimes with a block of code which is exactly what I'd type. But actively letting it code (at least with gpt4.1 or gpt4o) just doesn't work well enough for me. Half of the time it doesn't even compile, and after fixing that it's just not really correctly working either. I'd expect it to work like a very junior progra…

complete coding noob here.

if I want to throw a shuriken abiding to some artificial, magic Magnus force like in the movie wanted, both chatGpt and Claude let me down, using pygame. what if I wanted c-level performance or if I wanted to use zig? burp.

It works like the average Microsoft employee, like some doped version of an orange wig wearer who gets votes because his daddys kept the population as dumb as it gets after the dotcom x Facebook era. in essence, the ones to be disappointed by are the Chan-Zuckerbergs of our time. there was a chance, but there also was what they were primed for

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

#512

Post by skydhash »

gwbas1c wrote: post #502

> If listening to a 70 year old disk makes you happier, just do it. You'll listen to more music if you do that than you would by forcing yourself to use the more "productive" streaming service. Ironically, when I listen to vinyl instead of streaming, I listen to less music. If I'm in the zone, I will often go minutes between flipping the record or choosing another one; even though my record player is right next to me…

Listening to a good album is an immersive experience. I often don't have the urge to directly play another one. If I do, they often similar thematically or by the same artist.

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

#513

Post by mccoyb »

gspencley wrote: post #320
lordnacho wrote: post #236

I'm getting a lot of side-quest productivity out of AI. There's always a bunch of things I could do, but they are tedious. Yet they are still things I wish I could get done. Those kinds of things AI is fantastic at. Building a mock, making tests, abstracting a few things into libraries, documentation. So it's not like I'm delivering features in one day that would have taken two weeks. But I am delivering features in…

> making tests What I'm about to discuss is about me, not you. I have no idea what kind of systems you build, what your codebase looks like, use case, business requirements etc. etc. etc. So it is possible writing tests is a great application for LLMs for you. In my day to day work... I wish that developers where I work would stop using LLMs to write tests. The most typical problem with LLM-generated tests on the cod…

Force the LLM to write property-based tests (depends on the language you use whether or not good libraries are available -- but if they are available 100% make use of them). Iterate with the LLM on the invariants.

Forcing the discussion of invariants, and property-based testing -- seems to improve on the issues you're mentioning (when using e.g. Opus 4), especially when combined with the "use the public API" or interface abstractions.

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

#514

Post by jaggederest »

tptacek wrote: post #501
samtp wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing and that is interesting to read through. But it's still just a demo, not live production code. From the readme: > As of March, 2025, this library is very new, prerelease software. I'm not looking for personal proof that their workflows work as well as they say they do. I just want an example of a project in production with active users depending on the service for business functions that has been w…

See, I just shared Kenton Varda describing his entire workflow, and you came back asking that I please show you a workflow that would find more credible. Do you want to learn about people's workflows, or do you want to argue with them that their workflows don't work? Nobody is interested in doing the latter with you.

It almost feels like sealioning. People say nobody shares their workflow, so I share it. They say well that's not production code, so I point to PRs in active projects I'm using, and they say well that doesn't demonstrate your interactive flow. I point out the design documents and prompts and they say yes but what kind of setup do you do, which MCP servers are you running, and I point them at my MCP repo.

At some point you have to accept that no amount of proof will convince someone that refuses to be swayed. It's very frustrating because, while these are wonderful tools already, its clear that the biggest thing that makes a positive difference is people using and improving them. They're still in relative infancy.

I want to have the kind of conversations we had back at the beginning of web development, when people were delighted at what was possible despite everything being relatively awful.

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

#515

Post by voxleone »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #500
jdelman wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please stop assuming that every comment that includes an em dash is AI. Em dashes are very useful!

Back in the day i used square brackets [but now i think they are too heavy].

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

#516

Post by rcxdude »

PaulHoule wrote: post #424
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

Assuming there aren't tricky concurrency issues and the documentation makes sense (you know what registers to set to configure and otherwise work the device,) device drivers are the easiest thing in the world to code. There's the old trope that systems programmers are smarter than applications programmers but SWE-Bench puts the lie to that. Sure, SWE-Bench problems are all in the language of software, applications pr…

To some extent, for sure. The fact that electronics engineers that have picked up a bit of software write a large fraction of the world's device drivers does point to it not being the most challenging of software tasks, but on the other hand the real 'systems engineering' is writing the code that lets those engineers do so successfully, which I think is quite an impressive feat.

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

#517

Post by samtp »

tptacek wrote: post #501
samtp wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing and that is interesting to read through. But it's still just a demo, not live production code. From the readme: > As of March, 2025, this library is very new, prerelease software. I'm not looking for personal proof that their workflows work as well as they say they do. I just want an example of a project in production with active users depending on the service for business functions that has been w…

See, I just shared Kenton Varda describing his entire workflow, and you came back asking that I please show you a workflow that would find more credible. Do you want to learn about people's workflows, or do you want to argue with them that their workflows don't work? Nobody is interested in doing the latter with you.

I don't think you understood me at all. I don't care about the actual workflow. I just want an example of of a project that:

1. Would have legal, security, or monetary consequences if bad code was put in production

2. Was developed using an AI/LLM/Agent/etc that made the development many times faster than it otherwise would have (as so many people claim)

I would love to hear an example where "I used Claude to develop this hosting/ecommerce/analytics/inventory management service that is used in production by 50 paying companies. Using an LLM we deployed the project in 4 week where it would normally take us 4 months." Or "We updated an out of date code base for a client in half the time it would normally take and have not seen any issues since launch"

At the end of the day I code to get paid. And it would really help to be able to point to actual cases where both money and negative consequences of failure are on the line.

So if you have any examples please share. But the more people deflect the more skeptical I get about their claims.

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

#518

Post by bongodongobob »

necovek wrote: post #403
bongodongobob wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said anything about lines of code. I would assume output here means features completed, tickets knocked out, tasks completed etc.

Even so, tickets munched out or tasks completed is still "output" — sometimes you could provide more value by avoiding tickets that are not bringing benefits to customers or business, solving things customers need and not what they think they need, suggesting solutions which are 5% of work yet provide 90% of the value, etc.

My job is to do what's asked of me. Do the stories, knock out the tickets. It helps me do that faster. That's a crazy far goalpost move from you.

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

#519

Post by IncreasePosts »

bumblehean wrote: post #275
lvl155 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This has never been the case in any company I've ever worked at. Even if you can finish your day's work in, say, 4 hours, you can't just dip out for the other 4 hours of the day. Managers and teammates expect you to be available at the drop of a hat for meetings, incidents, random questions, "e…

No, but you can go onto hn and shitpost every 30 minutes, instead of only being able to do it twice a day previously.

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

#520

Post by samtp »

jaggederest wrote: post #514
tptacek wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I just shared Kenton Varda describing his entire workflow, and you came back asking that I please show you a workflow that would find more credible. Do you want to learn about people's workflows, or do you want to argue with them that their workflows don't work? Nobody is interested in doing the latter with you.

It almost feels like sealioning. People say nobody shares their workflow, so I share it. They say well that's not production code, so I point to PRs in active projects I'm using, and they say well that doesn't demonstrate your interactive flow. I point out the design documents and prompts and they say yes but what kind of setup do you do, which MCP servers are you running, and I point them at my MCP repo. At some poi…

I don't care about your workflow, that can be figured out from the 10,000 blog posts all describing the same thing. My issue is with people claiming this huge boost in productivity only to find out that they are working on code bases that have no real consequence if something fails, breaks, or doesn't work as intended.

Since my day job is creating systems that need to be operational and predictable for paying clients - examples of front end mockups, demos, apps with no users, etc don't really matter that much at the end of the day. It's like the difference between being a great speaker in a group of 3 friends vs standing up in front of a 30 person audience with your job on the line.

If you have some examples, I'd love to hear about them because I am genuinely curious.

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