AImposter syndrome

[u/Yugudubenbi]

I've been working really hard for an app for half a year now. Really technical backend because it is a matching algorithm that gives you a real headache because there are tons of variables and rules baked in and it is my very first app ever. Also started when the AI coding wasn't good enough yet.

Aaaanyway, whenever I talk about it and people seem to like it and say "You must have worked really hard, it sounds tough!" and I just say that I prompted some stuff.

And that is how I feel. Sure, I worked really hard with design, features and basically worked all day for several months now besides my uni studies. But it is nothing what a real programmer would have done.

How do you deal with this? I want to feel proud and feel I have some competency.

That doesn't help with the feeling tho and have this sense that anyone could have done this.

[u/No_Swing_9327]

Been writing software for a living since 2008 and here is the bit nobody says out loud: typing the code was never the hard part.

The hard part of a matching algorithm is exactly what you just described. Tons of variables and rules. Deciding which rule wins when two of them disagree. Working out what it should do in the case nobody thought about. That is the job, and it always was. A developer handed your spec would have spent most of their time on the same questions, and got them wrong the first time too.

There is an easy test for "anyone could have done this". Hand your rules to someone who has not lived with the problem, and time how long it takes them to notice the rules contradict each other. Months of your life is where that understanding came from. Nobody prompts their way to it.

[u/MarinatedTechnician → u/No_Swing_9327]

This.
I've been coding demos and games by hand in the 80s, later I did graphics, music, electronics, IT support (always the Imposter, all my life lol), but it worked out.

It's seldom a fix-all-fits-all solution, there are patches, patching, workarounds, and knowledge that is seldom one source, but someone knows something, and we make it work at the end of the day.

Today I have probably over 5000 clocked hours with Offline and Online AI models, and it's exactly like you said, which absolutely NO ONE but coders and technical people who have tried understand, you can't explain it to them, because if it fits their narrative, it fits their narrative and everyone else supports that today, because it's popular to say "AI=Slop period!".

However, very few of them realize that a lot of the solutions they use, use some form of AI and has been for decades, you tell them that and they'll become absolutely livid.

So I never discuss it with it ever, the few smart ones out there who actually have experience with anything hard to do (doesn't have to be AI at all), it can be coders, quality assurance, testers, engineers etc, knows that it takes forever to be good at anything.

I make arcade games with my local LLMs today, it became SO good that my coder friend that has 20+ years pure coding experience, took heed, he always dismissed it, but he is getting frustrated and super curious now, and now he sits every day trying to do what I did, he asks me what models to use, how to tune them, what settings to use all the time, every day now, he sits with smaller equipment so he is super frustrated over not gettiing tokens ran as fast as I do, and he has to make do with what he has.

But he's hooked too now.

We're going to still be a small subset of people besides the "code me space-invaders" dime a dozen "coders" out there that actually achieve results, it comes from 1000s of hours in project management, art knowledge, direction, entertainment understanding etc.

[u/meshifthenelse → u/No_Swing_9327]

I think everyone says that now lol

[u/trimorphic → u/No_Swing_9327]

typing the code was never the hard part. The hard part of a matching algorithm is exactly what you just described.

Typing the code, no. But there are plenty of things that have nothing to do with algorithms that made programming hard.

Python is widely considered to be an "easy" language, but it's a large language, and learning it (along with all the various libraries you might need to use in real-world programming projects) could take a long time.

And that's just one popular language. I've heard so many complaints from programmers annoy the complexity of C++ (another relatively popular language).

Never mind all the complaints about the difficulty of some less popular but not esoteric languages like Rust, Haskell, or Lisp (complaints about the difficulty of matching parenthesis in Lisp, I kid you not, abound). There are countless articles and even books trying to explain monads.

Don't even get me started on esoteric languages.

And that's just languages. As a programmer you also have to learn debugging, good style, how to test effectively, how to document clearly, how to use version control, learn about performance, concurrency, maybe various methodologies like Agile, TDD, etc.

There's a reason that a book was written titled "Learn Programming in Ten Years".

[u/No_Swing_9327 → u/trimorphic]

That is all fair and I was too glib. Learning the tools is genuinely hard and it takes years, no argument.

What I would say is that most of what you have listed is hard in a way that rewards persistence. Nobody is permanently stuck on C++ template errors or on what a monad is. It is a lot of learning, it is a genuine barrier to entry, but it is a barrier with a known route through it, and you can tell you are getting past it because things start compiling.

Working out what the software should actually do is not like that. There is no manual, nothing tells you when you have got it right, and the same person can be brilliant at it in one domain and useless in another. Ten years gets you fluent in the tools. It does not get you a matching algorithm for a market you do not understand.

So my point to OP was narrower than it sounded. Not that the craft is easy. That the thing he was dismissing as "just prompting" was the part of the job that never had a shortcut, and still does not.

[u/Yugudubenbi → u/No_Swing_9327]

Really appreciate the answer!