We might all be AI engineers now • Hacker News Board

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#291

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #276

prescriptivist wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet. I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means fo…

I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I'm also able to give it a lot of very specific instructions and correct a lot of mistakes quickly because I look at the code and understand what it's doing; and I'm also asking it to write code in domains I understand. So I don't think these skills are obsolete at all. If anything, keeping them sharp is the only differentiator we have. "Agentic Engi…

>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but..

I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case.

Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are faster are just so clearly faster that it sort of hides the times that they're not. Statistics of performance over a number of developers can flatten things out. But I don't know that is the case.

So my question for you, and everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know? Given all the studies showing that it doesn't make you faster, how are you so sure it does?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#292

Post by twodave » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

_dwt wrote: post #112

v3xro wrote: post #44

The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-using side of this) is strict liability for companies making software products (just like in the physical world). Then it doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and sort out any externalities caused. This will pr…

I think this is coming, alongside professional licensure for "software engineers". Every public-facing project will need someone to put a literal stamp of approval on the code, and regardless whether Claude or Codex wrote the bulk of it, it'll be that person's head on a pike when something goes wrong. This isn't what many of us probably would have wanted, but I think the public blowback when "AI-coded" systems start…

This already exists. They’re called software audits, and the more risk-averse your customers are they more required they become.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#293

Post by beepbooptheory » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

_dwt wrote: post #123

noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

I simply have no need for these things. I am faster, smarter, and I understand more. I syntesize disparate concepts your SoT models could never dream of. Why should I waste the money? I have all that I need up in my brain.

When everyone forgets how to read, I'll be thriving. When everyone is neurotic from prompting-brain, I will be in my emacs, zen and unburdened.

I love that yall have them though, they are kinda fun to mess with. And as long as I can review and reject it, all yalls little generations are acceptable for now.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#294

Post by tern » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:47 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #158

tern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

But that knowledge was never hidden or out of reach. Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Everyone has tons of ideas. But every good engineer (and scientist) also knows that most of our ideas fall apart when either thinking deeper or trying to implement it (same thing, just mental or not). Those nuances and details don't go aw…

I hear you, but I have subtle disagreements:

> Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy.

Sure, but it's just way faster now. I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand, rather than having to spend minutes or hours tracking down the right information, then scanning around the text to filter out all the irrelevant stuff.

There's also a motivational effect: the activation energy of bothering to do this was such that in many domains, it didn't seem worth it.

> Everyone has tons of ideas

Most people have profoundly bad ideas

> Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again.

Agree, however that's the challenge of this time. Things are becoming less visible. On the other hand, you can implement and get that feedback ten times faster, or point ten minds at stress-testing a concept in 3 minutes. For many of my projects, that's the difference between getting anything done vs idly fantasizing. For others, it could easily be irrelevant.

> The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it.

I don't think this is a coherent statement. How could you possibly surmount complexity with anything other than better ideas and more hands?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#295

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

jascha_eng wrote: post #135

sn0wflak3s wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote it myself. But the irony isn't lost on me. "Who did what" is kind of the whole point of the article. Appreciate the feedback.

FWIW I reported your post to the mods because it reads completely AI generated to me. My judgement was that it might have been slightly edited but is largely verbatim LLM output. Some tells that you might wanna look at in your writing, if you truly did write it yourself without Any LLM input are these contrarian/pivoting statements. Your post is full of these and it is imo the most classic LLM writing tell atm. These…

[deleted]

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#296

Post by sameerds » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:53 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #291

overgard wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I'm also able to give it a lot of very specific instructions and correct a lot of mistakes quickly because I look at the code and understand what it's doing; and I'm also asking it to write code in domains I understand. So I don't think these skills are obsolete at all. If anything, keeping them sharp is the only differentiator we have. "Agentic Engi…

>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are fas…

> everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know?

For me, AI tools act like supercharged code search and auto complete. I have been able to make changes in complex components that I have rarely worked on. It saved me a week of effort to find the exact API calls that will do what I needed. The AI tool wrote the code and I only had to act as a reviewer. Of course I am familiar with the entire project and I knew the shape of the code to expect. But it saved me from digging out the exact details.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#297

Post by cowlby » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

I'm starting to think for software it's produce 2,000 loaves per month. I'm realizing now software was supply-constrained and organizations had to be very strategic about what apps/UIs to build. Now everything and anything can be an app and so we can build more targeted frontends for all kinds of business units that would've been overlooked before.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#298

Post by johnfn » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

_dwt wrote: post #123

noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

Time and time again that I observe it is the AI skeptic that is not reacting with curiosity. This is almost fundamentally true, as in order to understand a new technology you need to be curious about it; AI will naturally draw people who are curious, because you have to be curious to learn something new.

When I engage with AI skeptics and I "ask these people what they're really thinking, and listen" they say something totally absurd, like GPT 3.5-turbo and Opus 4.6 are interchangeable, or they put into question my ability as an engineer, or that I am a "liar" for claiming that an agent can work for an hour unprompted (something I do virtually every day). This isn't even me picking the worst of it, this is pretty much a typical conversation I have on HN, and you can go through my comment history to verify I have not drawn any hyperbole.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#299

Post by thunky » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #282

thunky wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work And others see too much value in their work.

Yes, we should punish care and craftsmanship. That's a recipe for success.

Obsolescence is not punishment.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#300

Post by bandrami » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

prescriptivist wrote: post #193

_dwt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to try to put this kindly: it is very glib, and people will find it offensive and obnoxious, to implicitly round off all resistance or skepticism to incuriosity. Perhaps to alienate AI critics even further is the goal, in which case - carry on. But if you are genuinely confused by the attitudes of your peers, try asking not "what do I have that they lack" ("curiosity"?) but "what do they see that I don't"…

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet. I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means fo…

I'm still going to need at least one of my vendors to speed up their release pace before I'll believe that. I'm seeing a ton of churn and no actual new product.