I haven't felt impostor syndrome in a while. And it's not because I've ended up knowing everything, it's the exact opposite. I know full well there's a ton of stuff that gets past me, and even so it doesn't weigh on me the way it used to.
AI moves at a speed I've never seen at any other point in my career. Every few days, every few weeks, some tool or model or way of working shows up and changes what you were doing last week. Keeping up with all of it is impossible. That's exactly where you'd expect the impostor to squeeze hard, but with me it does the opposite.
Saying "I haven't tried it" doesn't make you an impostor
It happens to me every week. A client or an agency asks me about something, a new model, a tool that just came out, some way of setting up agents, and a lot of the time the honest answer is "I know it exists, but I haven't really used it yet". Other times it's just flat out "I don't know, I haven't tried it".
That sentence used to embarrass me. Now I say it without any guilt, the way you'd say you haven't watched the show everyone's talking about. It exists, it's out there, I'll get to it when it's time.
Because there's a difference between not knowing some specific thing in a field that changes every month and pretending you do know it. The first one is normal. The second one would actually make you an impostor. The real impostor is the guy who improvises a confident answer so he doesn't look bad and ends up blowing smoke. I'll take "I haven't tried it" a hundred times over that.
What really keeps the syndrome away
And here's the part that's a bit awkward to admit out loud. What keeps impostor syndrome away is looking around me.
When I talk to clients and agencies, I realize most of them are far more lost than I am. They don't know what models are out there or what each one is for. They can't tell the difference between running an AI locally and hitting an external API. They have no idea what a harness is, or why a flow with automated tests and a closed feedback loop gives you something decent while throwing a raw prompt at it gives you garbage half the time. A lot of them are still working the same way they were a year or two ago. Slower and more expensive, with no clue there's another way to do things.
It's hard to feel like an impostor when you're the one explaining to the client why their approach doesn't work.
Being called a crack makes me a little uncomfortable
Some people call me a crack, an expert, and ask me like I've got an answer for everything. It makes me a little uncomfortable, because I don't feel like any of that. I know perfectly well what I'm missing, and I know there are people who know way more than me about all of this. The thing is, those people usually aren't in the meetings I'm in.
I didn't set up local servers or get into local inference because I'm smarter than anyone. I did it because I like it and because I want to be riding the crest of the wave while it lasts. Ending up ahead of the people around me is more a side effect of that than any real achievement, and the bar isn't that high either. Tinker with things consistently and have a bit of judgment and you already stand out.
So no, impostor syndrome didn't go away because I got good. It went away because I get to see up close how lost almost everyone is. I'll admit it's not the nicest reason to feel at ease, but it works for me.