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

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

#661

Post by Scarblac »

alphazard wrote: post #414
Scarblac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the hard part is figuring out the more complex parts. Getting that right is what takes the time, not typing in the more trivial parts.

The point is that good software engineers are good at doing the "hard part". So good that they have a backlog of "trivial" typing tasks. In a well functioning organization they would hand off the backlog of trivial parts to less experienced engineers, who might be herded by a manager. Now we don't need the less experienced engineers or the manager to herd them.

And how do we get new experienced engineers?

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

#662

Post by t43562 »

morpheos137 wrote: post #652
t43562 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One cannot learn everything from books and in any case many books contradict each other so every developer is a variation based on what they have read and experienced and thought along the way. How can that get summed up into one thing? It might not even be useful to do that. I suspect that some researchers with a very different approach will come up with a neural network that learns and works more like a human in fu…

What is baffling to me is how otherwise intelligent people don't really understand what human intelligence and learning are about. They are about a biological organism following its replication algorithm. Why should a computer program learn and work like a biological organism if it is in an entirely different environment with entirely different drives? Intelligence is not some universal abstract thing acheivable afte…

...because so far only our attempts to copy nature have proven successful...in that we have judged the result "intelligent".

There's a long history in AI where neural nets were written off as useless (Minsky was the famous destroyer of the idea, I think) and yet in the end they blew away the alternatives completely.

We have something now that's useful in that it is able to glom a huge amount of knowledge but the cost of doing so it tremendous and therefore in many ways it's still ridiculously inferior to nature because it's only a partial copy.

A lot of science fiction has assumed that robots, for example, would automatically be superior to humans - but are robots self-repairing or self replicating? I was reading recently about how the reasons why many developers like python are the reasons why it can never be made fast. In other words you cannot have everything - all features come at a cost. We will probably have less human and more human AIs because they will offer us different trade offs.

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

#663

Post by jeffyang »

bumblehean wrote: post #275
lvl155 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter: you are looking at it wrong. You can get work done in 1/2 of the time it used to. Now you got 1/2 of the day to just mess around. Socialize or network. It’s not necessarily that you’re producing 2x.

> You can get work done in 1/2 of the time it used to. Now you got 1/2 of the day to just mess around. Socialize or network. This has never been the case in any company I've ever worked at. Even if you can finish your day's work in, say, 4 hours, you can't just dip out for the other 4 hours of the day. Managers and teammates expect you to be available at the drop of a hat for meetings, incidents, random questions, "e…

In an attempt to have a positive framing around this, with the disclaimer that I haven't actually fully tried this, one idea might be to spend the extra time on all the politics stuff and marketing yourself and figuring out how to get in good with your manager and get promoted. And that stuff is not easy and you might not be good at it, but spending time on it is good practice and will slow you down in the areas you are good at so there's nothing to hide.

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

#664

Post by jeffyang »

bradlys wrote: post #295
bumblehean wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can get work done in 1/2 of the time it used to. Now you got 1/2 of the day to just mess around. Socialize or network. This has never been the case in any company I've ever worked at. Even if you can finish your day's work in, say, 4 hours, you can't just dip out for the other 4 hours of the day. Managers and teammates expect you to be available at the drop of a hat for meetings, incidents, random questions, "e…

I'll go even further. I've been the guy who gets all his work done way faster than others. You know what happens? I get assigned way more work than most people until I am overflowing and the literal bottleneck is my peers being able to code review everything I do. Yet, I am still blamed for overproducing then too cause now I am creating too much work for my peers! Literally unwinnable scenarios. Only way to succeed i…

I mentioned this in a sibling comment, but one idea I have is instead of doing this extra work which is unrecognized, you spend your extra time on gaming the presentation and appearances aspect of it. Which you might not be good at at first but would be practice and probably have compounding gains in your career. And to add an extra interesting challenge is how can you game it with high integrity.

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

#665

Post by ffsm8 »

necovek wrote: post #646
ffsm8 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot use it on my production code base. I'm working for a company that requires the devs to code from virtual workplaces, which is a fancy term to say virtual machines running in the azure cloud. These are completely locked down and anything but copilot is forbidden from use, and enforced via firewall and process monitoring. I can still use sonnet 3.7 through that, but that's a far cry from my experience on my pe…

I did not miss the time horizon: this is why I put a remark of "ever, really". "Toy project" is usually used in a different context (demonstrate something without really doing something useful): yours sounds more like a "hobby project".

That's a good point. Ive actually implemented the same project over 20 times at this point.

At the heart is my hobby of reading web and light novels. I've been implementing various versions of a scraper and ePub reader for over 15 years now, ever since I started working as a programmer.

I've been reimplementing it over the years with the primary goal of growing my experiences/ability. In the beginning it was a plain Django app, but it grew from that to various languages such as elixir, Java (multiple times with different architecture approaches), native Android, JS/TS Frontend and sometimes backend - react, angular, trpc, svelte tanstack and more.

So I know exactly how to implement it, as I've give through a lot of version for the same functionality. And the last version I implemented (tanstack) was in July, via Claude Code and got to feature parity (and more) within roughly 3 weeks.

And I might add: I'm not positive about this development either, whatsoever. I'm just expecting this to happen, to the detriment of our collective futures (as programmers)

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

#666

Post by [deleted] »

pornel wrote: post #651
generalizations wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made an STT tool (guess who wrote it for me) and have a bluetooth mic. I spend 10 minutes pacing and telling the AI what I need it to build, and how to build it. Then it goes off and builds it, and meanwhile I go to the next Claude Code instance on a different project, and do the same thing there. Then do the same for a third, and maybe by that time the first is ready for more direction. Depending on how good you a…

Young man, software often has more than 50 lines of code that merely merges basic examples from two libraries. That stuff is useful too, but that's a 0.5x intern, not a 10x developer. I've told the same Claude to write me unit tests for a very well known well-documented API. It was too dumb to deduce what edge cases it should test, so I also had to give it a detailed list of what to test and how. Despite all of that,…

[deleted]

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

#667

Post by generalizations »

Scarblac wrote: post #661
alphazard wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that good software engineers are good at doing the "hard part". So good that they have a backlog of "trivial" typing tasks. In a well functioning organization they would hand off the backlog of trivial parts to less experienced engineers, who might be herded by a manager. Now we don't need the less experienced engineers or the manager to herd them.

And how do we get new experienced engineers?

good != experienced. The barrier to entry is simply becoming much, much higher.

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

#668

Post by axi0m »

Great post. The author precisely described what I have been experiencing for the last months of digging deep into that field (with quite a lot of anxiety at first, hearing here and there what a miracle it was). As long as we don't solve context window limitations and self-improving/continuous learning problem, human engineers still have a long way ahead of them.

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

#669

Post by axi0m »

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…

You're talking about a neophyte trying to accomplish an engineering job. So yes, in such case, LLMs dramatically change the game, at least for entry-level tasks. Nowadays, anyone can litteraly pretend to be good/average in any field.

The article relates about actual, experienced engineers trying to get even better. That's a completely different matter.

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

#670

Post by jonathanstrange »

jdefr89 wrote: post #451
jonathanstrange wrote: post #105

I've tested Gemini Pro 2.5 yesterday with a function I had troubles with. It wasn't something I can't do, just one of those things easy to get wrong that I postponed because I lacked focus that day due to a heat wave. The AI spit out a perfect function with working tests after the first prompt. Now I don't want to sound like a doomsayer but it appears to me that application programming and corresponding software comp…

You just said we won’t need to develop apps anymore.. What will be the AI need to create at all?

Ephemeral data processing and visualization programs. Nothing that needs to be installed or downloaded or runs on some web server. The concept is pretty simple. The operating system+AI will create those on the fly.
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