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

colton.dev

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

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nowadays if you type that into a search engine you may be overwhelmed with ads or articles of varying quality that you'll need to read and deeply understand to adapt to your use-case.

> you'll need to read and deeply understand to adapt to your use-case This sort of implies you are not reading and deeply understanding your LLM output, doesn't it? I am pretty strongly against that behavior

I didn't say that. When you're trying to get a job done, it's time consuming to sift through a long tutorial online because a big part of that time is spent determining whether its garbage and whether its solving the exact problem that you need to solve. IME the LLM helps with both of those problems.

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

#592
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 langua…

> 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

It is a serious question. I've spent much more than 5 minutes testing this, and I've found that your "totally new paradigm" is for morons

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

#593
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?

In my experience a lot our "google engineers" now do both. We tend to preach that they go to the documentation first, since that will almost always lead to actual understanding of what they are working on. Eventually most of them pick up that habbit, and in my experience, they never really go back to being "google engineers" after that... Where the AI helps with this, is that it can search documentation rather well. We do a lot of work with Azure, and while the Microsoft documentation is certainly extensive, it can be rather hard to find exactly what you're looking for. LLM's can usually find a lot of related pages, and then you can figure out which are relevant easier than you can with google/ecosia/ddg. I've havent used kagi, so maybe that works better?

As far as writing "tedious" code goes, I think the AI agents are great. Where I have personally found a huge advantage is in keeping documentation up-to-date. I'm not sure if it's because I have ADHD or because my workload is basically enough for 3 people, but this is an area I struggle with. In the past, I've often let the code be it's own documentation, because that would be better than having out-dated/wrong documentation. With AI agents, I find that I can have good documentation that I don't need to worry about beyond approving in the keep/discard part of the AI agent. I also rarely write SQL, bicep, yaml configs and similar these days, because it's so easy to determine if the AI agent got it wrong. This requires you're an expert on infrastructure as code and SQL, but if you are, the AI agents are really fast. I think this is one of the areas where they 10x at times. I recently wrote an ingress for an ftp pod (don't ask), and writing all those ports for passive mode would've taken me a while. There are a lot of risk involved. If you can't spot errors or outdated functionality quickly, then I would highly recommend you don't do this. Bicep LLM output is often not up to date, and since the docs are excellent what I do in those situations is that I copy/paste what I need. Then I let the AI agent update things like parameters, which certainly isn't 10x but still faster than I can do it.

Similarily it's rather good at writing and maintaining automatic tests. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're working with actively dealing with corrupted states directly in your code. But we do fail-fast programming/Design by Contract so the tests are really just an extra precaution and compliance thing, meaning that they aren't as vital as they will be for more implicit ways of dealing with error handling.

I don't think AI's are good at helping you with learning or getting unstuck. I guess it depends on how you would normally deal with. If the alternative is "google programming" and I imagine it is sort of similar and probably more effective. It's probably also more dangerous. At least we've found that our engineers are more likely to trust the LLM than a medium article or a stackoverflow thread.

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

#594

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…

> They don’t require formal models or diagrams. Nor do they produce those (do they?). That is what I would like to see. Formal models and diagrams are not needed to produce code. Their point is that they allow us to understand code and to formalize what we want it to do. That's what I'm hoping AI could do for me.

Have a look at https://zfhuang99.github.io/tla+/pluscal/chatgpt/2023/09/24/...

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

#595
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'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.

I think that the key realization is that there are tasks where LLMs excel and might even buy you 10x productivity, whereas some tasks their contribution might even be net negative.

LLM are largely excellent at writing and refactoring unit tests, mainly because their context is very limited (i.e., write a method in a class that calls this specific method of this specific class a specific way and check the output) and their output is very repetitive (i.e., write isolated methods in standalone classes without output that are not called anywhere). They also seem helpful when prompted to add logging. LLMs are also effective in creating greenfield projects, serving as glorified template engines. But when lightly pressed on specific tasks like implementing a cross-domain feature... Their output starts to be at best a big ball of mud.

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

#596

I don't consider myself a 10x engineer. The number one thing that I've realized makes me more productive than other engineers at my company is thinking through system design and business needs with patterns that don't take badly written product tickets literally. What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. A…

> What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.

100%. The biggest challenge with software is not that it’s too hard to write, but that it’s too easy to write.

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

#598
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To date, I've not been able to effectively use Copilot in any projects. The suggestions were always unusably bad. The /fix were always obviously and straight up false unless it was a super silly issue. Claude Code with Opus model on the other hand was mind-blowing to me and made me change my mind on almost everything wrt my opinion of LLMs for coding. You still need to grow the skill of how to build the context and f…

So what happens when someone calls in and the "AI" answers (because the receptionist has been fired and replaced by "AI"), and the caller asks to access some company record that should be private? Will the LLM always deny the request? Hint: no, not always. There are so many flaws in your plan, I have no doubt that "AI" will ruin some companies that try to replace humans with a "tin can". LLMs are being inserted loose…

> Will the LLM always deny the request? Hint: no, not always.

And you are confident that the human receptionist will never fall for social engineering?

I don't think data protection is even close to the biggest problem with replacing all/most employees with bots.

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

#599
I wonder if the gap between perception and reality, from that recent study, is because AIs are still so slow? The modern equivalent of https://xkcd.com/303/ might be "Waiting for the agent to complete!" So then you know you're more productive (and can spend more ten minute chunks of time reading HN) but your boss doesn't see it....
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