Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by amichayg » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

The core value of LLMs is simple: sometimes you need to write code, but what you really want is to design, experiment, or just get something usable.

Even when you do write code, you often only care about specific aspects—you just want to automate the rest.

This is hard to reconcile with modern business models. If you tell someone that a software engineer can also design, they’ll just fire the designer and pile more work on the engineer. But it doesn’t change the underlying truth: a single engineer who can touch many parts of the software with low cognitive friction is simply a better kind of engineer.

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

#602

Post by clauderoux » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

This article nails it. The claim 10x is in my opinion one of these tactics used by large corporations to force engineers into submission. The idea that you could be replaced with an AI is frightening enough to keep people in check, when negotiating your salary. AI is a wonderful tool that I use everyday, and I have been able to implement stuff that I would have considered too cumbersome to even start working on. But, it doesn't make you a 10x more efficient engineer. It gives you an edge when you start a new project, which is already a lot. But don't expect your whole project of 100,000 lines to be handled by the machine. It won't happen any time soon.

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

#603

Post by misja111 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:22 AM UTC

The article is spot on, however, who is claiming a 10x speed up from AI? I have heard many crazy claims so far but nothing that bad.

In addition to the article, I'd like to add that most DEV jobs I have been in had me coding only 50% of my time at most. The rest of the time was spent in meetings, gathering requirements and investigating Prod issues.

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

#604

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:30 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #584

PaulHoule wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure if this counts as systems or application engineering, but if you think your computer doesn't lie to you, try writing an nginx config. Those things aren't evaluated at /all/ the way they look like they are.

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

#605

Post by lmeyerov » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:32 AM UTC

It took me a month , despite having done prompt engineering for work the 2 years prior, to hit the real starting line of Claude code productivity

Basically, the ability to order my thoughts into a task list long & clear enough for the LLM to follow that I can be working on 3 or so of these in parallel, and maybe email. Any individual run may be faster or slower than I can do it manually, but critically, they take less total human time / attention. No individual technique is fundamentally tricky here, but it is still a real skill.

If you read the article, the author is simply not there, and sees what they know as only 1 weeks worth of knowledge. So for their learning rate .. maybe they need 3x longer of learning & experience?

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

#606

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:32 AM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #568

mavamaarten wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ful…

I've found this with Claude Code too. It has nonstop energy (until you run out of tokens) and is always a little too eager to make random edits, which means it's somehow very tiring to use even though you're not doing anything.

But it is the most productive intern I've ever pair programmed with. The real ones hallucinate about as often too.

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

#607

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #539

Waterluvian wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This feels exactly right and is what I’ve thought since this all began. But it also makes me think maybe there are those that A.I. helps 10x, but more because that code input is actually a very large part of their job. Some coder…

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. If you really are a programmer who gets all of their work assigned to them as detailed specifications maybe you are seeing a 10x boost. I don't think I've encountered programmer like that in my own career, but I guess they might exist somewhere!

Personally I've found it's very good at writing support tools / shell scripts. I mostly use it to parse the output of other tools that don't have machine-readable output yet.

Claude Code (which is apparently the best in general) isn't very good at reviewing existing large projects IME, because it doesn't want to load a lot of text into its context. If you ask it to review an existing project it'll search for keywords instead of just loading an entire file.

That and it really wants to please you, so if you imply you own a project it'll be a lot more positive than it may deserve.

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

#608

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:47 AM UTC

belter wrote: post #497

kaonwarb wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if LLMs worked perfectly without hallucinations (they don't and might never), a conscientious developer must still comprehend every line before shipping it. This seems excessive to me. Do you comprehend the machine code output of a compiler?

False analogy. I must comprehend code at the abstraction level I am working at. If I write Python, I am responsible for understanding the Python code. If I write Assembly, I must understand the Assembly. The difference is that Compilers are deterministic with formal specs. I can trust their translation. LLMs are probabilistic generators with no guarantees. When an LLM generates Python code, that becomes my Python cod…

Compilers definitely don't have formal specs. Even CompCert mostly but doesn't entirely have them.

It can actually be worse when they do. Formalizing behavior means leaving out behavior that can't be formalized, which basically means if your language has undefined behavior then the handling of that will be maximally confusing, because your compiler can no longer have hacks for handling it in a way that "makes sense".

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

#609

Post by misja111 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 7:47 AM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #298

Say you want to create a web app, but you don't know any web dev. You spend a couple of months reading front-end and back-end dev, incrementally create something, and after half a year you've made a web app you like. Say you spent 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks, going from zero to a functional web app. So you spent 120 hours in total. Now let's say you use Claude code, or whatever, and you're able to creat…

This is true, for small projects, one-offs and prototypes AI is great, it will save you loads of time.

However most paid jobs don't fall into this category.

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

#610

Post by dandanua » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 8:27 AM UTC

clauderoux wrote: post #602

This article nails it. The claim 10x is in my opinion one of these tactics used by large corporations to force engineers into submission. The idea that you could be replaced with an AI is frightening enough to keep people in check, when negotiating your salary. AI is a wonderful tool that I use everyday, and I have been able to implement stuff that I would have considered too cumbersome to even start working on. But,…

Funnily, you probably won't see in news the idea that 10x increase in productivity should lead to 10x increase in compensation (with the exception of CEOs and very top engineers, that get even bigger multiplier).