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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
21–30 of 330 posts
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#22AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me.
What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#23> This is not a contradiction. It is the reality ... > That is not an upgrade. That is a career identity crisis. This is not X. It is Y. > The trap is ... > This gap matters ... > This is not empowerment ... > This is not a minor adjustment... Your typical AI slop rhetorical phrasing. Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" These sound analytica…
N=1. I'm not convinced yet.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#24[flagged]
Well how many side projects did you ship last year? I’ve written small programs in the last few months over a weekend that would have taken me a month to do a couple years ago, and they’re better. Not in terms of code quality, but in terms of features I wanted and knew how to implement but couldn’t be bothered, Opus can do in one minute and even if it’s not the optimal implementation it’s completely functional, fine, and costs me almost nothing.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#25> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written
Article definitely has an AI writing style
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#26[flagged]
I mean if you've built 7 side projects (and we assume it's the same phase since total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased), how are these things still a bottleneck to you? I'm assuming you're building in a domain/language you're comfortable with by now (unless you're crazy and try something fundamentally different on each of those shipped products).
Why will the 8th project still have those things as the bottleneck given your experience?
Also if you're not seeing any real gains in productivity, why are you using AI for your side projects and wasting tokens/money?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#27Regarding expanding role:
The scenario I'm somewhat worried about is that instead of 1 PM, 1 designer and 5 developers, there will be 1 PM, 1 designer and 1 developer. Even if tech employment stays stable or even slightly increases due to Jevons paradox, the share of software developers in tech employment will shrink.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#28Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
I couldn’t even finish it. I picked up on it after reading the other one that made it to the front page the other day.
I don’t think there will be a point in coming to this site if it’s just going to be slop on the front page all the time.
Maybe mods should consider a tag or flag for AI generated content submissions?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#29Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
It is almost 90% generated using AI text. So many paragraphs to say basically nothing at all. Like look at this paragraph: > Junior engineers have traditionally learned by doing the simpler, more task-oriented work. Fixing small bugs. Writing straightforward features. Implementing well-defined tickets. This hands-on work built the foundational understanding that eventually allowed them to take on more complex challen…
What would he have written instead?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#30The author introduces the term "Supervision Paradox", but IMHO this is simply one instance of the "Automation Paradox" [1], which has been haunting me since I started working in IT. Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...
Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" are just AI slop.