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

Post by trylist » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:41 AM UTC

mgfist wrote: post #145

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…

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…

Post by tptacek » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:56 AM UTC

timmytokyo wrote: post #565

tptacek wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by mlrtime » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:14 AM UTC

manmal wrote: post #496

theshrike79 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 is the reason I keep paying for Claude Code Pro. For 20 a month I can get my stupid tool and utility ideas from "it would be cool if I could..." to actual "works well enough for me" -tools in an evening - while I watch my shows at the same time. After a day at work I don't have the energy to start digging through, say, OpenWeather's latest 3.0 API and its nuances and how I can refactor my old code to use the new A…

Ghostty has native push notification support for Claude Code‘s „finished“ events.

Post by swader999 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:44 AM UTC

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #167

I am a dinosaur but still feel strongly enough to post this PSA: please go back and read "No Silver Bullet" (and his follow up) again. You should probably schedule a re-read every 2-5 years, just to keep your sanity in these crazy, exhausting times. I believe his original thesis remains true: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magn…

Post by swader999 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

nimos wrote: post #106

Claude max is $200 a month. Consider a fully loaded cost of 200k for an engineer or $16,666 per month. They only have to be >1.012x engineer for the "AI" to be worth it. Of course that $200 dollars per month is probably VC subsidized right now but there is lots of money on the table for <2x improvement.