Coleton Voege – Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome: “AIs still struggle to absorb the context of a larger codebase, even with a great prompt and CLAUDE.md file. If you use a library that isn’t StackOverflow’s favorite it will butcher it even after an agentic lookup of the documentation. Agents occasionally do something neat like fix the tests they broke. Often they just waste time and tokens, going back and forth with themselves not seeming to gain any deeper knowledge each time they fail. Thus, AI’s best use case for me remains writing one-off scripts. Especially when I have no interest in learning deeper fundamentals for a single script, like when writing a custom ESLint rule. Dark warnings that if I didn’t start using AI now I’d be hopelessly behind proved unfounded. Using AI to code is not hard to learn. Obviously? Well, the AI coding community seems split on whether AI makes coding so easy a caveman can do it or that it requires an advanced, dedicated prompt engineer skillset. There are a few things you need to learn but they come quickly. You learn how to split up tasks into smaller pieces so the AI doesn’t lose its mind late in the context window. Tools like Claude Code can do a bit of this themselves, even, though not always reliably. And you learn to identify when the AI is too far off and it’s time to take the wheel. A competent engineer will figure this stuff out in less than a week of moderate AI usage. Further, if AI is about to get 2x, 10x, or 100x better at any minute (as everyone keeps saying it will), then any lessons about how to use it now are moot for the future. Every time I encountered AI working “just okay”, it strangely made me more anxious, not less. It meant I couldn’t find the spicy secret sauce that made everyone else so productive. I just didn’t have what it takes: dinosaur, meet asteroid, thy name is AI. Eventually, a few things shook me out of this slump. One of those was this article from Ludicity, directly countering the claims of the AI pumpers. I write this article to share more things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome..”