> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment.
> The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who reduces a vague debate into crisp tradeoffs. The one who identifies the missing abstraction. The one who can debug reality, not just read code. The one who can create clarity where everyone else sees noise
How do you think engineers in the second half got there? By writing tons and tons of code to "build those reps" and gain that experience.
The author tries to answer this:
> That process is not optional. It is how engineers acquire and elevate their competency. If early-career engineers use A.I. to remove all struggle from the learning loop, they are hurting their development.
but in a world wherein writing code by hand (the "struggle") is "artisinal" and "outdated", this process being non-optional (which I agree with) is contradictory.
How juniors and fresh grads do that with AI that is designed to give you whatever answer you need in a given moment is unclear to me. I don't see how that's possible, but maybe I'm thinking too myopically.