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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

#521

Post by tptacek »

samtp wrote: post #517
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.

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…

Seems like I understand you pretty well! If you wanted to talk about workflows in a curious and open way, your best bet would have been finishing that comment with something other than "the more people deflect the more skeptical I get". Stay skeptical! You do you.

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

#522

Post by jes5199 »

QuercusMax wrote: post #383
jes5199 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe, but I find that it makes it much faster to do things that _I already know how to do_, and can only slowly, ploddingly get me to places that I don't already have a strong mental model for, as I have to discover mistakes the hard way

I've only used Copilot, but this is just about exactly right. (I've only used it for Python.) If I'm writing a series of very similar test cases, it's great for spamming them out quickly, but I still need to make sure they're actually right. This is easier to spot errors because I didn't type them out. It's also decent for writing various bits of boilerplate for list / dict comprehensions, log messages (although they…

things backed by Claude Sonnet can get a little further out than Copilot can, and when it’s in agent mode _sometimes_ it will do things like read the library source code to understand the API, or google for the docs

but the principle is the same: if the human isn’t doing theory-building, then no one is

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

#523

Post by kasey_junk »

samtp wrote: post #520
jaggederest wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use agentic flows writing code that deals with millions of pieces of financial data every day.

I rolled out a PR that was a one shot change to our fundamental storage layer on our hot path yesterday. This was part of a large codebase and that file has existed for four years. It hadn’t been touched in 2. I literally didn’t touch a text editor on that change.

I have first hand experience watching devs do this with payment processing code that handles over a billion dollars on a given day.

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

#524

Post by bpt3 »

rob_c wrote: post #434
bpt3 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the idea was that AI would make us collectively better off, not flood the zone with technical debt as if thousands of newly minted CS/bootcamp graduates were unleashed without any supervision. LLMs are still stochastic parrots, though highly impressive and occasionally useful ones. LLMs are not going to solve problems like "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case". AI mig…

> "what is the correct security model for this application given this use case". Frankly I've seen LLMs answer better than people trained in security theatre so be very careful where you draw the line. If you're trying to say they struggle with what they've not seen before. Yes, provided that what is new isn't within the phase space they've been trained over. Remember there's no photographs of cats riding dinosaurs b…

Saying that they aren't worse than an incompetent human isn't a ringing endorsement.

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

#525

Post by Tronno »

necovek wrote: post #204
fnands wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talking a PM down from a task that was never feasible One of our EMs did this this week. He did a lot of homework: spoke to quite a few experts and pretty soon realised this task was too hard for his team to ever accomplish, if it was even possible. Lobbied the PM and, a VP and a C-level, but managed to stop a lot of wasted work from being done. Sometimes the most important language to know as a dev is English* s/E…

An aside, but I am curious: as an old hat today, I now find that using the Perl RE (though some of it lives on through sed) syntax as "we used to do back in the day" in regular communications confuses most people. People are usually unfamiliar with it, so I am slowly phasing it out. What's your experience? And what do the "kids" use these days to indicate alternative options (as above — though for that, I use bash {}…

I've never used Perl and I am not confused. It's just an eyeroll-inducing referential joke, and ironically a perfect example of OP's point. See also: $BIGCORP, Day_Job, etc

They could have just said "the most important language [...] is spoken language".

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

#526

Post by samtp »

kasey_junk wrote: post #523
samtp wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use agentic flows writing code that deals with millions of pieces of financial data every day. I rolled out a PR that was a one shot change to our fundamental storage layer on our hot path yesterday. This was part of a large codebase and that file has existed for four years. It hadn’t been touched in 2. I literally didn’t touch a text editor on that change. I have first hand experience watching devs do this with pa…

Thanks, it's quite helpful to hear examples like that.

When you say you didn't touch a text editor, do you mean you didn't review the code change or did you just look at the diff in the terminal/git?

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

#527

Post by samtp »

tptacek wrote: post #521
samtp wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seems like I understand you pretty well! If you wanted to talk about workflows in a curious and open way, your best bet would have been finishing that comment with something other than "the more people deflect the more skeptical I get". Stay skeptical! You do you.

Sorry if I came of as prickly, but it wasn't exactly like your parent comment was much kinder.

I mean it's pretty simple - there are a lot of big claims that I read but very few tangible examples that people share where the project has consequences for failure. Someone else replied with some helpful examples in another thread. If you want to add another one feel free, if not that's cool too.

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

#528

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

> 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.

This feels exactly right and is what I’ve thought since this all began.

But it also makes me think maybe there are those that A.I. helps 10x, but more because that code input is actually a very large part of their job. Some coders aren’t doing much design or engineering, just assembly.

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

#529

Post by kentonv »

samtp wrote: post #491
tptacek wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.ycombina…

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…

Dude.

That code tptacek linked you to? It's part of our (Cloudflare's) MCP framework. Which means all of the companies mentioned in this blog post are using this code in production today: https://blog.cloudflare.com/mcp-demo-day/

There you go. This is what you are looking for. Why are you refusing to believe it?

(OK fine. I guess I should probably update the readme to remove that "prerelease" line.)

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

#530

Post by jaggederest »

samtp wrote: post #520
jaggederest wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, I'm working on a database proxy in rust at the moment, if you hop on GitHub, same username. It's not pure AI in the PRs but I know approximately no Rust, so AI support has been absolutely critical. I added support for parsing binary timestamps from PG's wire format, as an example.

I spent probably a day building prompts and tests and getting an example of failing behavior in Python, and then I wrote pseudocode and had it implement and write comprehensive unit tests in rust. About three passes and manual review of every line. I also have an MCP that calls out to O3 as a second opinion code review and passes it back in

Very fun stuff

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