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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

#541

Post by mgfist »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #396
mgfist wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's so dramatically better it's not even funny. It's not that information doesn't exist out there, it's more that an LLM can give it to you in a few seconds and it's tailored to your specific situation. The second part is especially helpful if the internet answer is 95% correct but is missing something specific to you that ends up taking you 20 minutes to figure out.

> that ends up taking you 20 minutes to figure out That 20 minutes, repeated over and over over the course of a career, is the difference between being a master versus being an amateur You should value it, even if your employer doesn't. Your employer would likely churn you into ground beef if there was a financial incentive to, never forget that

Yeah I strongly disagree. I want to spend time figuring the things that important to me and my career. I could care less about the one regex I write every year. Especially when I've learned and forgotten the syntax more times than I can count.

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

#542

Post by mgfist »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #510
antonvs wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked whether it's really better than "what we already had with search engines, online documentation and online Q&A sites". How have you found it not to be significantly better for those purposes? The "not good enough for you to trust" is a strange claim. No matter what source of info you use, outside of official documentation, you have to assess its quality and correctness. LLM output is no different.

> How have you found it not to be significantly better for those purposes Not even remotely > LLM output is no different It is different A search result might take me to the wrong answer but an LLM might just invent nonsense answers This is a fundamentally different thing and is more difficult to detect imo

> A search result might take me to the wrong answer but an LLM might just invent nonsense answers

> This is a fundamentally different thing and is more difficult to detect imo

99% of the time it's not. You validate and correct/accept like you would any other suggestion.

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

#543

Post by kaonwarb »

belter wrote: post #497
kaonwarb wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if LLMs worked perfectly without hallucinations (they don't and might never), a conscientious developer must still comprehend every line before shipping it. This seems excessive to me. Do you comprehend the machine code output of a compiler?

False analogy. I must comprehend code at the abstraction level I am working at. If I write Python, I am responsible for understanding the Python code. If I write Assembly, I must understand the Assembly. The difference is that Compilers are deterministic with formal specs. I can trust their translation. LLMs are probabilistic generators with no guarantees. When an LLM generates Python code, that becomes my Python cod…

I think the analogy holds within the context of the statement I replied to: > Even if LLMs worked perfectly without hallucinations...

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

#544

Post by lemonwaterlime »

I'm consistently baffled at why software engineering is the only engineering to obsess over a mythical "10x" contributor. Mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineers do not have this concept.

What makes an excellent engineer is risk mitigation and designing systems under a variety of possible constraints. This design is performed using models of the domains involved and understanding when and where these models hold and where they break down. There's no "10x". There is just being accountable for designing excellent systems to perform as desired.

If there were a "10x" software engineer, such an engineer would prevent data breaches from occurring, which is a common failure mode in software to the detriment of society. I want to see 10x less of that.

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

#545

Post by fuzztester »

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…

>high on ketamine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine

Because of its hallucinogenic properties?

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

#547

Post by fuzztester »

oceanplexian wrote: post #241
__loam wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even saying it has a dozen PhDs belies the reality that these things have no relationship with the truth

I find statements like this kind of funny. If an AI assistant was the equivalent of “a dozen PhDs” at any of the places I’ve worked you would see an 80-95% productivity reduction by using it.

>you would see an 80-95% productivity reduction by using it.

they are the equivalent.

there is already an 80-95% productivity reduction by just reading about them on Hacker News.

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

#548

Post by pornel »

generalizations wrote: post #66

In 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…

This is tautological. If you keep instructions dumbed-down enough for AI to work well, it will work well.

The problem is that AI needs to be spoon-fed overly detailed dos and donts, and even then the output can't be trusted without carefully checking it. It's easy to reach a point where breaking down the problem into pieces small enough for AI to understand takes more work than just writing the code.

AI may save time when it generates the right thing on the first try, but that's a gamble. The code may need multiple rounds of fixups, or end up needing a manual rewrite anyway, after wasting time and effort on instructing the AI. The ceiling of AI capabilities is very uneven and unpredictable.

Even worse, the AI can confidently generate code that looks superficially correct, but has subtle bugs/omissions/misinterpretations that end up costing way more time and effort than the AI saved. It has uncanny ability to write nicely structured, well-commented code that is just wrong.

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

#549

Post by docmars »

spopejoy wrote: post #421
docmars wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With something like Devin, where it integrates directly with your repo and generates documentation based on your project(s), it's much more productive to use as an agent. I can delegate like 4-5 small tasks that would normally take me a full day or two (or three) of context switching and mental preparation, and knock them out in less than a day because it did 50-80% of the work, leaving only a few fixes or small pivo…

> Being able to refactor things with only a couple sentences is remarkably fast. I'm curious, this is js/ts? Asking because depending on the lang, good old machine refactoring is either amazeballs (Java + IDE) or non-existent (Haskell). I'm not js/ts so I don't know what the state of machine refactoring is in VS code ... But if it's as good as Java then "a couple of sentences" is quite slow compared to a keystroke or…

I'm using TypeScript. In my case, these refactors are usually small and only spanning up to 5 files depending on how interdependent things are. The benefit with an Agent is it's ability to find and detect related side effects caused by the refactor (broken type-safety, broken translation strings, etc.) and renaming for related things, like an actual UI string if it's tied to the naming of what I'm working on, and my changes happened to include a rename.

It's not always right, but I find it helpful when it finds related changes that I should be making anyway, but may have overlooked.

Another example: selecting a block that I need to wrap (or unwrap) with tedious syntax, say I need to memoize a value with a React `useMemo` hook. I can select the value, open Quick Chat, type "memoize this", and within milliseconds it's correctly wrapped and saved me lots of fiddling on the keyboard. Scale this to hundreds of changes like these over a week, it adds up to valuable time-savings.

Even more powerful: selecting 5, 10, 20 separate values and typing: "memoize all of these" and watching it blast through each one in record time with pinpoint accuracy.

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

#550

Post by mhuffman »

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #544

I'm consistently baffled at why software engineering is the only engineering to obsess over a mythical "10x" contributor. Mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineers do not have this concept. What makes an excellent engineer is risk mitigation and designing systems under a variety of possible constraints. This design is performed using models of the domains involved and understanding when and where these mo…

>Mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineers do not have this concept.

>What makes an excellent engineer is risk mitigation and designing systems under a variety of possible constraints.

I take it that those fields also don't live by the "move fast and break things" motto?

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