AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

Summary

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome A few months ago I went through a bit of a mental slump. I've always been confident of my abilities as an engineer, but I couldn't help but feel like my skills were falling hopelessly behind as I scrolled places like LinkedIn and Twitter. If these sources were to be believed, engineering had moved on from the medieval practice of typing code into an editor. Real engineers were now 10-100x more productive than I was. I'm writing this hoping to help others who are feeling similar anxieties. I'm a skeptical person so I don't usually fall over myself immediately when I hear a claim like that. I usually roll my eyes in the same way I do when someone tells me a simple herbal remedy cures all disease. But the sheer volume these 10x engineer claims are reaching right now started to hit a nerve. What if I'm wrong? Will I miss the bus and become unemployable if I don't learn to use AI right now? After all, there are a lot of fancy words going around that distance the "AI" these people are talking about with the "AI" I was familiar with. These people were using ✨agentic✨ AI. They were using ✨thinking✨ models that surfed the internet, ran tests, and corrected their own mistakes. Sure I popped into a chat window here and there and asked it to write some code, then promptly discarded most of the output once I got the idea that I needed. But these engineers were letting Claude fully take the wheel and had agents ripping 5 PRs for them while they made morning coffee. Was I becoming a dinosaur, an old man yelling at cloud? Part of what made me feel so anxious was that it was entirely possible AI changed without me knowing it because I didn't use AI very much. Because I didn't like using AI that much. Reviewing code is vastly less enjoyable process than writing it. Had my stubborn desire to enjoy coding set me up to be left behind? Diving In Eventually I hit a breaking point and decided I s...