Thanks colton. Man, you just made me feel 10x better :) And ahh yes I said 10x. :P
Personally, he made me feel 100x better!
Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
581–590 of 675 posts
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#582> It's not good at keeping up with the standards and utilities of your codebase. Not my experience. You can instruct Claude Code to respect standards and practices of your codebase. In fact I noticed that Claude Code has forced me to make few genuinely important things like documenting more, writing more E2E tests and tracking architectural and style changes. Not only I am forcing myself to a consistent (and well tho…
Yes, I'm forced to be a real senior dev now, rigid specs, documentation, enforced coverage. Was easier before just hiring really smart people that didn't have to have everything spelled out for them.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#583Is anybody (who has the data) actually claiming use of AI will make a single average engineering 10x faster/better? Or the data showing something else... possibly, a company starts telling engineers to use AI, then RIFs a huge portion, and expects the remaining engineers to pick up the slack. They now claim "we're more efficient!" when they've just asked their employees to work more weekends.
I have points completed over a six week period at 4.3 per day average, similar architecture was 3.5 points per week before Claude code. The average with Claude is slowing though, need a couple of more months to make any conclusions but management won't let me stop now lol.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#584Earlier 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
Assuming there aren't tricky concurrency issues and the documentation makes sense (you know what registers to set to configure and otherwise work the device,) device drivers are the easiest thing in the world to code. There's the old trope that systems programmers are smarter than applications programmers but SWE-Bench puts the lie to that. Sure, SWE-Bench problems are all in the language of software, applications pr…
> device drivers are the easiest thing in the world to code.
Except the documentation lies and in reality your vendor shipped you a part with timing that is slightly out of sync with what the doc says and after 3 months of debugging, including using an oscilloscope, you figure out WTF is going on. You report back to your supplier and after two weeks of them not saying any thing they finally reply that the timings you have reverse engineered are indeed the correct timings, sorry for any misunderstandings with the documentation.
As an application's engineer, my computer doesn't lie to me and memory generally stays at a value I set it to unless I did something really wrong.
Backend services are the easiest thing in the world to write, I am 90% sure that all the bullshit around infra is just artificial job security, and I say this as someone who primarily does backend work now days.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe to get an impression that they'd be performing like them - but not actually performing. It helps me being lazy because I have a rough expectation of what the outcome should be - and I can directly spot any corner cases or other issues the AI proposed solution has, and can either prompt it to fix that, or (more often) fix those parts myself. The bottom 20% may not have enough skill to spot that, and they'll prod…
I randomly stumbled across Tekwetu who've made a pretty good step-by-step example of coding with Claude Code, using MCPs, etc.[1]. None of the upsell or gushing. It's a pretty simple app with a backend, with a slightly complicated storage mechanism. I was watching to learn how other devs are using Claude Code, as my first attempt I pretty quickly ran into a huge mess and was specifically looking for how to debug bett…
Personally I find MCP a bit limiting - I'm using Emacs bindings, and then provide LLMs elisp functions to call.
I posted a demo here a while ago where I try to have it draw turtle graphics:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013939
Since then I've also provided enough glue that it can interact with the Arch Linux installer in a VM (or actual hardware, via serial port) - with sometimes hilarious results, but at least some LLMS do manage to install Arch with some guidance:
https://github.com/aard-fi/arch-installer
Somewhat amusingly, some LLMs have a tendency to just go on with it (even when it fails), with rare hallucinations - while other directly start lying and only pretend they logged in.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#586There’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…
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Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#587Thanks colton. Man, you just made me feel 10x better :) And ahh yes I said 10x. :P
I'm happy to hear that! A lot of people posting their hot takes here about how AI is actually great or actually awful, but I was hoping to have more conversations like this in the comments. I'm glad I can help people feel better.
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a YC video just a few months ago where a bunch of jergoffs sat in a circle and talked about engineers being 10 to 100x as effective as before. Im sure google will bring it up.
> Im sure google will bring it up. It didn’t.
Found it https://youtu.be/IACHfKmZMr8
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#589There’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…
At same time, there's also a huge of annoying Tech-brothers constantly shouting at artists something like, 'Your work was never valuable to begin with; why can't I copy your style? You're nothing but another matrix.'
Re: Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There's a funny quote about regex
"You had a problem. You tried to solve it with regex. Now you have two problems"
1) your original problem 2) your broken regex
I would like to propose an addition
"You had a problem. You tried to solve it with AI generated regex. Now you have three problems"
1) your original problem 2) your broken regex 3) your reliance on AI