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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

#561

Post by galangalalgol »

fuzztester wrote: post #545
edm0nd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Because people like getting high and look for justifications to do so.

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

#562

Post by bodhi_mind »

kkukshtel wrote: post #357
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…

2 heavily resonates with me. Simon Wilson made the point early on that AI makes him more ambitious with his side projects, and I heavily agree. Suddenly lots of things that seemed more or less un-feasible are now not only do-able, but can actually meet or exceed your own assumptions for them. Being able to sit down after a long way of work and ask an AI model to implement some bug or feature on something while you re…

Funny. This is exactly how I use it too. I love to make a ui change prompt and switch to the browser and watch hot reload incrementally make the changes I assume will happen.

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

#564

Post by anytime5704 »

torginus wrote: post #459
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…

I now understand what artists felt when seeing stable diffusion images - AI code is often just wrong - not in the moral sense, but it contains tons of bugs, weirdness, excess and peculiarities you'd never be happy to see in a real code base. Often getting rid of all of this, takes comparable amount of time as doing the job in the first place. Now I can always switch to a different model, increase the context, prompt…

> When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.

This really irritates me. I’ve had the same experience with teammates’ pull requests they ask me to review. They can’t be bothered to understand the thing, but then expect you to do it for them. Really disrespectful.

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

#565

Post by timmytokyo »

tptacek wrote: post #498
timmytokyo wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of rhetorical tactics, that's an awfully narrow definition of LLM hallucination designed to evade the argument that they hallucinate. If, according to you, LLMs are so good at avoiding hallucinations these days, then maybe we should ask an LLM what hallucinations are. Claude, "in the context of generative AI, what is a hallucination?" Claude responds with a much broader definition of the term than you have i…

What is this supposed to convince me of? The problem with hallucinations is (was?) that developers were getting handed code that couldn't possibly have worked, because the LLM unknowingly invented entire libraries to call into that don't exist. That doesn't happen with agents and languages with any kind of type checking. You can't compile a Rust program that does this, and agents compile Rust code. Right across this…

If I ask an LLM to write me a skip list and it instead writes me a linked list and confidently but erroneously claims it's a skip list, then the LLM hallucinated. It doesn't matter that the code compiled successfully.

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

#566

Post by ewoodrich »

jf22 wrote: post #338
timmytokyo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so it's good enough to write code on its own without time-consuming, excessive hand-holding. But it's not good enough to write comments on its own.

If you put in the work to write rules and give good prompts you get good results just like every other tool created by mankind. How often do you use coding LLMs?

I can't speak to comments rules specifically but I am a heavy user of "agentic" coding and use rules files and while they help they are simply not that reliable. For something like comments that's probably not that big of a deal because some extra bad comments isn't the end of the world.

But I have rules that are quite important for successfully completing a task by my standards and it's very frustrating when the LLM randomly ignores them. In a previous comment I explained my experiences in more detail but depending on the circumstances instruction compliance is 9/10 times at best, with some instructions/tasks as poor as 6/10 in the most "demanding" scenarios particularly as the context window fills up during a longer agentic run.

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

#567

Post by jolt42 »

edanm wrote: post #537
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 qui…

Programmers are notoriously bad about making estimates. Sure it sped something up 10x, but did you consider those 10 tries using AI that didn't pan out? You're not even breaking even, you are losing time.

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

#568

Post by mikepurvis »

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…

Two other observations I've found working with ChatGPT and Copilot:

First, until I can re-learn boundaries, they are a fiasco for work-life balance. It's way too easy to have a "hmm what if X" thought late at night or first thing in the morning, pop off a quick ticket from my phone, assign to Copilot, and then twenty minutes later I'm lying in bed reviewing a PR instead of having a shower, a proper breakfast, and fully entering into work headspace.

And on a similar thread, Copilot's willingness to tolerate infinite bikeshedding and refactoring is a hazard for actually getting stuff merged. Unlike a human colleague who loses patience after a round or two of review, Copilot is happy to keep changing things up and endlessly iterating on minutiae. Copilot code reviews are exhausting to read through because it's just so much text, so much back and forth, every little change with big explanations, acknowledgments, replies, etc.

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

#569

Post by jimbo808 »

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…

You didn't read the article

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

#570

Post by YZF »

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…

They might not have that concept but they absolutely have those people. I worked with many mechanical and electrical engineers building complex machines. Some people are just much better than others. This might not happen with more cookie-cutter work but any creative work in these domains absolute has 10x or even 100x engineers. That said collaboration really helps here, i.e. the good engineer can help others solve problems and be more productive then they'd be on their own. In software this seems to be harder for various reasons, one of which is that it's easier to demonstrate/see a good solution in the other domains but software tends to be a lot fuzzier.
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