AI Imposter Syndrome

Anyone who has worked in the tech field for more than a few weeks has almost certainly brushed up against imposter syndrome. It first starts right about when you start working professionally and for many people it never really goes away. It gets better for sure, but for many of us, we just learn to live with it. We live in a cycle of flying high on peaks of confidence then plummeting into valleys of self-doubt which continues until we die retire. I call this ‘the imposter cycle’.

Likewise, anyone with a pulse has heard about AI or ChatGPT over the last few years. It has spread far beyond tech circles with ChatGPT becoming the fastest growing consumer application in history at launch.

Like the imposter cycle, any new technology has a similar cycle of hype associated with it while people try to figure out how to use it. AI is no exception to this, however the cycle of hype surrounding it feels far more intense than with other recent tech such as Crypto currencies.

The hype around LLMs is starting to reach a fever pitch, with many tech CEOs ¹ making proclamations about the current state of the industry and its trajectory: “developers will need to adapt”, “maybe we do need less software engineers”. Regardless of whether you buy the AI hype, every new AI headline published dumps more fuel onto the global tyre fire of public opinion - AI is coming for your job and will soon replace entire swaths of employees. Or, AI generated code is still so poor and riddled with hidden bugs, like a fine swiss cheese, that making sure it actually works gives you negative productivity and all in all is just wishful thinking

I was thinking about the imposter cycle today when I realised that the current AI hype cycle reminds me a lot of how the imposter cycle feels. Just like the imposter syndrome cycle, AI seems to be either poised to completely eradicate developers then a hop, skip and jump to AGI, or one step away from completely collapsing under the weight of all that VC funding and more akin to a useful idiot than anything that will put you out of a job. It all just depends on which part of the hype cycle we’re in.

Like most things and like the imposter cycle, the real outcome is probably going to land somewhere in the middle, with AI becoming another tool in the toolbox for a developer to whip out when they need to tackle the simple menial tasks ², or have an intelligent rubber duck to bounce ideas off of. Like No-Code products, or even higher level programming languages before it, it seems likely that both sides of the hype surrounding AI will eventually meet somewhere in the middle as we slowly settle into the plateau of productivity.

So to sum up: don’t stress about AI taking your job too much. New tech will come and go, but there will always be people hyping it up (or decrying it). The wheels will keep on turnin’. Just like we live with the cycle of imposter syndrome, dealing with the hype cycle is just part of the job. Every developer sometimes feels like an imposter sometimes, and every hype cycle eventually burns out.