Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

colton.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 675 posts

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

#621

Post by throwawaymaths »

briangriffinfan wrote: post #614
throwawaymaths wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just don't get why people say they don't reason. It's crazy talk. the kv cache is effectively a unidirectional turing machine so it should be possible to encode "reasoning" in there. and evidence shows that llms occasionally does some light reasoning. just because it's not great at it (hard to train for i suppose) doesn't mean it does it zero.

Would I be crazy to say that the difference between reasoning and computation is sentience? This is an impulse with no justification but it rings true to me.

fine. prove to me llms aren't sentient. your proof can't just be "vibes"

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

#622

Post by briangriffinfan »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #621
briangriffinfan wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I be crazy to say that the difference between reasoning and computation is sentience? This is an impulse with no justification but it rings true to me.

fine. prove to me llms aren't sentient. your proof can't just be "vibes"

See: "This is an impulse with no justification." In that sense yes my justification absolutely can be vibes, and it is! Suck it!

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

#623

Post by gwbas1c »

skydhash wrote: post #512
gwbas1c wrote: post #502

> If listening to a 70 year old disk makes you happier, just do it. You'll listen to more music if you do that than you would by forcing yourself to use the more "productive" streaming service. Ironically, when I listen to vinyl instead of streaming, I listen to less music. If I'm in the zone, I will often go minutes between flipping the record or choosing another one; even though my record player is right next to me…

Listening to a good album is an immersive experience. I often don't have the urge to directly play another one. If I do, they often similar thematically or by the same artist.

> Listening to a good album is an immersive experience.

That's when/if you're giving it your full attention. I used to do that when I was younger, but much less frequently now.

That being said, there's something hypnotic about watching a record spin, and seeing the needle in the groove. I don't do it now that I'm older, but my kids used to specifically ask me to play a record just so they could see it spin.

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

#624

Post by throwawaymaths »

briangriffinfan wrote: post #622
throwawaymaths wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fine. prove to me llms aren't sentient. your proof can't just be "vibes"

See: "This is an impulse with no justification." In that sense yes my justification absolutely can be vibes, and it is! Suck it!

i see we are in agreement

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

#625

Post by DennisP »

briangriffinfan wrote: post #614
throwawaymaths wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just don't get why people say they don't reason. It's crazy talk. the kv cache is effectively a unidirectional turing machine so it should be possible to encode "reasoning" in there. and evidence shows that llms occasionally does some light reasoning. just because it's not great at it (hard to train for i suppose) doesn't mean it does it zero.

Would I be crazy to say that the difference between reasoning and computation is sentience? This is an impulse with no justification but it rings true to me.

Taking a pragmatic approach, I would say that if the AI accomplishes something that, for humans, requires reasoning, then we should say that the AI is reasoning. That way we can have rational discussions about what the AI can actually do, without diverting into endless discussions about philosophy.

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

#626

Post by jjani »

commanderkeen08 wrote: post #536
jjmarr wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of en dashes and short staccato sentences for rhetorical flourishes are a giveaway. AI writes like a LinkedIn post. > Why? Because LLMs don’t just autocomplete. They generate. And in doing so, they challenge our identity, not just our workflows. is what raised flags in my head. Rather than explain the difference between glorified autocompletion and generation, the post assumes there is a difference then uses…

Here’s the thing though…if you read enough of it, you’re gonna start using it a lot more often. It’s not just AI slop, it’s fundamentally rewiring how we as a society think in real time! It’s the classic copycat AI mannerisms cried wolf Problem!

Haha, got a laugh out of me assuming you were intentionally demonstrating by example :)

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

#627

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

The other thing is that I don't believe software developers actually "do their best" when writing the code itself, that is, optimize the speed of writing code. Nor do they need to; they know writing the code doesn't take up time, waiting for CI and a code review and that iteration cycle does.

And does an AI agent doing a code review actually reduce that time too? I have doubts. Caveat, I haven't seen it in practice yet.

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

#628

Post by WD-42 »

paulcole wrote: post #619
WD-42 wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found it https://youtu.be/IACHfKmZMr8

So this whole discussion started because some guy got triggered by a thinly veiled advertisement on a podcast run by a VC firm? I’ll admit this is not helping the case of “but people are saying…”

You asked who’s making these silly claims, I provided one example of YC partners doing it. Not sure who got triggered or what advertising you are talking about, but there you go.

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

#629

Post by naasking »

I recently used Google's Gemini to review and debug some code that was performing some runtime code generation in .NET. It pointed out some issues I was aware of, some cases I hadn't considered but would have eventually hit with some testing, and then helped debug why some tests were failing. Pretty impressive actually. Probably wasn't a 10x savings, but definitely 2x or more in some cases, and some of the tasks it eliminated were the tedious ones, which is a big help for motivation.

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

#630

Post by hyperadvanced »

ares623 wrote: post #431
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…

I'd be curious how skill atrophy affects engineers who use AI semi-exclusively for these trivial tasks.

I tried doing all of my work for ~1 month with copilot/claude. It didn’t cause a ton of atrophy, because it didn’t work - I couldn’t avoid actually getting involved in rewriting code
Post reply on HN