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

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

#531

Post by kasey_junk »

samtp wrote: post #526
kasey_junk wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I reviewed that PR in the GitHub web gui and in our CI/CD gui. It was one of several PRs that I was reviewing at the time, some by agents, some by people and some by a mix.

Because I was the instigator of that change a second code owner was required to approve the PR as well. That PR didn't require any changes, which is uncommon but not particularly rare.

It is _common_ for me to only give feedback to the agents via the GitHub gui the same way I do humans. Occasionally I have to pull the PR down locally and use the full powers of my dev environment to review but I don't think that is any more common than with people. If anything its less common because of the tasks the agents get typically they either do well or I kill the PR without much review.

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

#532

Post by pbronez »

edm0nd wrote: post #175
mavamaarten wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I'd expect it to work like a very junior programmer, but it works like a very drunk senior programmer that isn't listening to you very well at all. This seems to be the current consensus. A very similar quote from another recent AI article: One host compares AI chatbots to “a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time.” https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i…

The “multiple PhDs” thing is interesting. The point of a PhD is to master both a very specific subject and the research skills needed to advance the frontier of knowledge in that area. There’s also plenty of secondary issues, like figuring out the politics of academia and publishing enough to establish a reputation.

I don’t think models are doing that. They certainly can retrieve a huge amount of information that would otherwise only be available to specialists such as people with PhDs… but I’m not convinced the models have the same level of understanding as a human PhD.

It’s easy to test though- the models simply have to write and defend a dissertation!

To my knowledge, this has not yet been done.

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

#533

Post by samtp »

kentonv wrote: post #529
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…

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.)

Lol misunderstanding a disclaimer in a readme is not refusing to believe something. But my apologies and appreciate the clarification.

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

#534

Post by belter »

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…

Looking forward to those 20x most productive days out of an LLMs. And what are those most productive days? The ones when you can simplify and delete hundreds of lines of code... :-)

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

#535

Post by kentonv »

samtp wrote: post #533
kentonv wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Lol misunderstanding a disclaimer in a readme is not refusing to believe something. But my apologies and appreciate the clarification.

Yeah OK fair that line in the readme is more prominent than I remember it being.

I never look at my own readmes so they tend to get outdated. :/

Fixing: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/pull/59

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

#536

Post by commanderkeen08 »

jjmarr wrote: post #480
dehugger wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here’s the thing though…if you read enough of it, you’re gonna start using it a lot more often. It’s not just AI slop, it’s fundamentally rewiring how we as a society think in real time! It’s the classic copycat AI mannerisms cried wolf Problem!

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

#537

Post by edanm »

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 agree. I'm a big fan/proponent of AI assisted development (though nowhere near your amount of experience with it). And I think that 2x-10x speed up can be true, depending on what you mean exactly and what your task is exactly.

This article thinks that most people who say 10x productivity are claiming 10x speedup on end-to-end delivering features. If that's indeed what someone is saying, they're most of the time quite simply wrong (or lying).

But I think some people (like me) aren't claiming that. Of course the end to end product process includes a lot more work than just the pure coding aspect, and indeed none of those other parts are getting a 10x speedup right now.

That said, there are a few cases where this 10x end-to-end is possible. E.g. when working alone, especially on new things but not only - you're skipping a lot of this overhead. That's why smaller teams, even solo teams, are suddenly super interesting - because they are getting a bigger speedup comparatively speaking, and possibly enough of one to be able to rival larger teams.

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

#538

Post by SchemaLoad »

CER10TY wrote: post #385
TrackerFF wrote: post #298

Say 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…

The issue is that it‘ll absolutely _suck_. If I tell Claude Code to scaffold a web app from 0 outside of React it‘s terrible. So no, imho people with no app dev skills cannot just build something over a weekend, at least something that won‘t break when the first user logs in.

They will build it, deploy it, get hacked and leak user data.

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

#539

Post by simonw »

Waterluvian wrote: post #528
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 coder…

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. If you really are a programmer who gets all of their work assigned to them as detailed specifications maybe you are seeing a 10x boost.

I don't think I've encountered programmer like that in my own career, but I guess they might exist somewhere!

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

#540

Post by Wowfunhappy »

commanderkeen08 wrote: post #536
jjmarr wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here’s the thing though…if you read enough of it, you’re gonna start using it a lot more often. It’s not just AI slop, it’s fundamentally rewiring how we as a society think in real time! It’s the classic copycat AI mannerisms cried wolf Problem!

Alternately, the AI learned it from us, because we write that way.

Which came first...

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