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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

#551

Post by jwrallie »

The problem with the 10x engineer myth is that there is no baseline to what an engineer is, as much as there is no baseline for what a human is.

Any tool can be shown to increase performance in closed conditions and within specific environments, but when you try to generalize things do not behave consistently.

Regardless, I would always argue that trying new tech / tools / workflows is always better than being stiff in your ways, regardless of the productivity results. I do like holding up on new things until things mature down a bit before trying though.

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

#552

Post by docmars »

skinnymuch wrote: post #364
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…

Is work paying for Devin or you are? How pricey is it to delegate the task example you gave?

Work is. I actually don't have access to our billing, so I couldn't tell you exactly, but it depends on how many ACUs (Agent Compute Units) you've used.

We use a Team plan ($500 /mo), which includes 250 ACUs per month. Each bug or small task consumes anywhere between 1-3 ACUs, and fewer units are consumed if you're more precise with your prompt upfront. A larger prompt will usually use fewer ACUs because follow-up prompts cause Devin to run more checks to validate its work. Since it can run scripts, compilers, linters, etc. in its own VM -- all of that contributes to usage. It can also run E2E tests in a browser instance, and validate UI changes visually.

They recommend most tasks should stay under 5 ACUs before it becomes inefficient. I've managed to give it some fairly complex tasks while staying under that threshold.

So anywhere between $2-6 per task usually.

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

#553

Post by moron4hire »

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…

If 10x could be believed, we're long enough into having AI-coding assist that any such company that had gone all in would be head and shoulders above their competitors by now.

And we're not seeing that at all. The companies whose software I use that did announce big AI initiatives 6 months ago, if they really had gotten 10x productivity gain, that'd be 60 months—5 years—worth of "productivity". And yet somehow all of their software has gotten worse.

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

#554

Post by mvdtnz »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #192
mgfist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest takeaway from using AI is that (1) for my day job, it doesn't make me super productive with creation, but it does help with discovery, learning, getting myself unstuck, and writing tedious code. (2) however, the biggest unlock is it makes working on side projects __immensely__ easier. Before AI I was always too tired to spend significant time on side projects. Now, I can see my ideas come to life (albeit w…

> (1) for my day job, it doesn't make me super productive with creation, but it does help with discovery, learning, getting myself unstuck, and writing tedious code I hear this take a lot but does it really make that much of an improvement over what we already had with search engines, online documentation and online Q&A sites?

> does it really make that much of an improvement over what we already had with search engines, online documentation and online Q&A sites?

This can't be a serious question? 5 minutes of testing will prove to you that it's not just better, it's a totally new paradigm. I'm relatively skeptical of AI as a general purpose tool, but in terms of learning and asking questions on well documented areas like programming language spec, APIs etc it's not even close. Google is dead to me in this use case.

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

#555

Post by mvdtnz »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #397
antonvs wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you boycotting AI or something? If you try it yourself you'll soon find out that the answer is a very obvious yes. You don't need a paid plan to benefit from that kind of assistance, either.

> Are you boycotting AI or something? At this point I am close to deciding to fully boycott it yes > If you try it yourself you'll soon find out that the answer is a very obvious yes I have tried plenty over the years, every time a new model releases and the hype cycle fires up again I look in to see if it is any better I try to use it a couple of weeks, decide it is overrated and stop. Yes it is improving. No it is…

[flagged]

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

#556

Post by esseph »

v3xro wrote: post #311
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

Probably the saddest comment I've read all day. Crafting software line-by-line is the best part of programming (maybe when dealing with hardware devices you can instead rely on auto-generated code from the register/memory region descriptions).

I think eventually the move to "coding with AI" may be like the jump from coding in low level to higher level languages was.

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

#557

Post by zdragnar »

jjmarr wrote: post #471
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 outnum…

I try using an LLM for coding now and then, and tried again today with giving a model dedicated to coding a rather straight forward prompt and task.

The names all looked right, the comments were descriptive, it has test cases demonstrating the code work. It looks like something I'd expect a skilled junior or a senior to write.

The thing is, the code didn't work right, and the reasons it didn't work were quite subtle. Nobody would have fixed it without knowing how to have done it in the first place, and it took me nearly as long to figure out why as if I'd just written it myself in the first place.

I could see it being useful to a junior who hasn't solved a particular problem before and wanted to get a starting point, but I can't imagine using it as-is.

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

#559

Post by fjlijwliej »

> 10x productivity means ten times the outcomes, not ten times the lines of code. This means what you used to ship in a quarter you now ship in a week and a half.

Exactly. I spend less than 20% of my time writing code. If LLMs 1,000,000,000-x'd my code writing, it would make me 1.25x as efficient overall, not 10x as efficient. It's all influencer hype nonsense, just like pair programming and microservices and no-code companies and blockchain.

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

#560

Post by simoncion »

tptacek wrote: post #499
Quarrelsome wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'm extrapolating what I read as strong language in your article as being a direct attack on making the code precise and flexible over good enough to ship (mediocre code, first-pass, etc). I imagine this might continue to be a battleground as adoption increases, especially at orgs with less engineering culture, in order to drive down costs and increase agentic throughput. However there is a bit of irony in that…

Again, as you've acknowledged, there's a whole meme structure in the industry about what a "10x" programmer is. I did not claim that LLMs turn programmers into "10x programmers", because I do not believe in "10x" programmers to begin with. I'm not being defensive, I'm rebutting a (false) factual claim. It's very clearly false; you can just read the piece and see for yourself.

> I'm not being defensive, I'm rebutting a (false) factual claim.

You're rebutting a claim about your rant that -if it ever did exist- has been backed away from and disowned several times.

From [0]

> > Wait, now you're saying I set the 10x bar? No, I did not.

>

> I distinctly did not say that. I said your article was one of the ones that made me feel anxious. And it's one of the ones that spurred me to write this article.

and from [1]

> I'm trying to write a piece to comfort those that feel anxious about the wave of articles telling them they aren't good enough, that they are "standing still", as you say in your article. That they are crazy. Your article may not say the word 10x, but it makes something extremely clear: you believe some developers are sitting still and others are sipping rocket fuel. You believe AI skeptics are crazy. Thus, your article is extremely natural to cite when talking about the origin of this post.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799049>

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804434>

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