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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

ivanturkovic.com

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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#81

Post by skydhash »

amelius wrote: post #45
Jasonleo wrote: post #33

AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.

Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Maybe this is not entirely true yet, but it most likely will be in the near future.

> Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that.

Can they really? Engineering is about keeping the whole picture in mind so that you know which lever to push and which to not push for a certain goal. Trying until you're lucky can get you to that goal, but it's costly and not sustainable. So you need someone that can work out a model for experimentation in a less costly manner.

Judgment in this case is about deciding which path to direct the project, tradeoffs is being aware that there are other paths that are better in some aspects. And responsibility is acknowledging that a bad decision will bear a personal cost.

Everyone does the above in their own domain. But I don't think I've ever see a manager wanting to do it in the engineering domain. It's more about pushing the engineer to accept the responsibility, but denying them the power of judgment.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#82

Post by JimBlackwood »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build.

For me, this is a bit different. Writing code has always been the bottleneck. I get most of my joy out of solving edge cases and finding optimizations. My favorite projects are when I’m given an existing codebase with the task, “When mars and venus are opposite eachother, the code gets this weird bug that we can’t reproduce.”

When a project requires me to start from scratch, it takes me a lot longer than most other people. Once I’ve thought of the architecture, I get bored with writing the implementation.

AI has made this _a lot_ easier for me.

I think the engineers who thrive wi be the ones know when to use what tool. This has been the case before AI, AI is just another tool allowing more people to thrive.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#83

Post by Thanemate »

fma wrote: post #50
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.

>However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users

Tech-savvy people might understand this feeling, but those who are responsible for hiring will easily proceed with another candidate that goes fast.

When push comes to shove, then, programmers will opt to have food to eat over handling technical debt generation.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#84

Post by ehnto »

RivieraKid wrote: post #34
hackersk wrote: post #6

[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.

Are most side projects in competition? I wouldn't think so.

Even if they were I disagree that 10x more ideas being produced means 10x more products in competition. You could leverage AI to execute but still have terrible ideas, leadership, product stewardship etc.

I think some clever people with a real and valuable insight will finally be able to turn that insight into a product. I also think the other 9 products will be get rich quick attempts by people with nothing to offer.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#85

Post by wreath »

Jasonleo wrote: post #33

AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.

We already knew this, but in the light of this AI hysteria we pretend like coding speed has always been the bottleneck

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#86

Post by TacticalCoder »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> The engineers who thrive will be the ones who can resist the temptation to over-engineer when the marginal cost of adding complexity drops to near zero.

One area --and many may not like that fact-- where it can help greatly is that the cost of adding tests also drops to near zero and that doesn't work against us (because tests are typically way more localized and aren't the maintenance burden production code is). And a some us were lazy and didn't like to write too many tests. Or take generative testing / fuzzy testing: writing the proper generators or fuzzers wasn't always that trivial. Now it could become much easier.

So we may be able to use the AI slop to help us have more correct code. Same for debugging edge cases: models can totally help (I've had case as simple as a cryptic error message which I didn't recognize: passed it + the code to a LLM and it could tell me what the error was).

But yup it's a given that, as you put it, when the marginal cost of adding complexity drops to near zero, we're opening a whole new can of worms.

TFA is AI slop but fundamentally it may not be incorrect: the gigantic amount of generated sloppy code needs to be kept in check and that's where engineering is going to kick in.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#87

Post by randomtoast »

amelius wrote: post #72
randomtoast wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N=2 form the same author: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-det... > AI is an in-context learner, not a standards enforcer. > The AI is not judging your code. It is learning from it. > Speed without structure is not speed. It is borrowed time. > This is not about premature optimization or over-engineering. It is about giving the AI the patterns it needs to work effectively on your behalf. > Thi…

AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.

If you think that the article is written by human or that is is unclear, please go ahead. Others here on HN also have pointed out that the author shoots out such lengthy blog posts every day. And you can also see the typical emoji AI slop here: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/services/

But I have no issue with your argumentation whatsoever, it is just that I think there is more than sufficient evidence, and you think there is not.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#88

Post by eloisant »

mountainriver wrote: post #42
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I feel like I mitigate this well by just running in a “plan” mode and really understanding everything it does and being careful to test every piece

That's the thing, currently people focus on using AI for code but you can use AI to help you in the other steps as well.

You can use it to discuss about what you should build, identify edge cases, ask you questions to force you to take decisions, etc.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#89

Post by RivieraKid »

hypfer wrote: post #52
RivieraKid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't me…

Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#90

Post by Thanemate »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

When the goal is to ship (the result) I'll happily leverage LLM's to try an idea or 3 out. However, it wouldn't be fair to claim that my side projects have exactly one goal. That's why I choose to use AI generated code when I deal with stuff that I already know how to do, done a lot of times, and the only thing that I gain from using AI is time typing it out.

Anything else? I'll struggle and grow as a developer, thanks. And before anyone says "but there are architecture decisions etc. so you still grow"... those existed anyways. If I have to practice, I'll practice micro AND macro skills.

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