AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
31–40 of 330 posts
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#32Not really, I disagree. The article did slightly touched on the real issue on why people enjoy writing code, a “craftsmanship”, yes, coding is NOT engineering, it is writing, and the people who enjoy doing it are actually writers not engineers, and I always keep mentioning that. With AI however, those writers have to be doing the engineering work: the goals, architecture design, managing blueprints, process design and refining, among many other things, and that job is not easy hence why engineers are “supposedly” paid well, AI now took the writing role, and you have to do the engineering one.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#33AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#34[flagged]
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#35[flagged]
> But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased.
Were you able to fairly split test?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#36The 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.
You seem to be right. The author is pumping out one such article per day. I think I've spent more time in forming my comment than they did in generating the article. Oh well :)
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
My point is that there's nothing to be written there "instead", it just is not needed text that is added to make the text longer, typical of AI writing that parrots the same points over and over to make up for word count.
Here's another example from the blog:
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.
> Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.
can just be:
> Most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.
Clarity is something that is taught in every writing class but AI generated text always seems to have this weird cadance as follows: The sound is loud. Not a whimper, not a roar, a simple sound that is very loud. And that's why... blah blah blah.
You have to care about your readers if you're writing something seriously. Throwing just a bunch of text that all mean the same thing in your writing is one of the bigger sins you can do, and that's why most people hate reading AI writing.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#38[dead]
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#39AI 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…
Yeah, GUI code, for example is notoriously chatty. Forms, charts, etc.
AI makes using them a breeze.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#40[flagged]
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
I can relate. Sincerely debating whether I quit my well-paying and comfortable corporate job and just go full-time entrepreneur before the opportunities disappear.