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Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

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Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#11

Post by simonw »

seattle_spring wrote: post #10
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "They wanted an engineer to build a chatbox that called ChatGPT with company documents as prompt context" fits the term "AI Engineer", personally - see https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer which uses it for "applied" AI.

Why would a self-described "AI Engineer" be any more capable of building that sort of functionality over any other backend engineer, especially one who is familiar with agent-assisted development?

Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky. You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs.

It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.

Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understand prompts, but there's a whole lot more to building software on top of LLMs than that.

Any engineer can get familiar with these things of course, just like any engineer can figure out what it takes to work on payment systems.

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#12

Post by gavinray »

simonw wrote: post #7
gavinray wrote: post #3

I wrote an entire blogpost about this ridiculous phenomenon: https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/absurdity-of-ai-engineer-t...

I think "They wanted an engineer to build a chatbox that called ChatGPT with company documents as prompt context" fits the term "AI Engineer", personally - see https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer which uses it for "applied" AI.

You don't call someone who integrates the Twilio API a "Twilio Engineer", or Mailchimp a "Mailchimp engineer"

Integrating third-party libraries to build an application is a significant chunk of the work in any SaaS product and the expectation is you can read the vendor docs and figure it out

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#13

Post by gavinray »

simonw wrote: post #11
seattle_spring wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a self-described "AI Engineer" be any more capable of building that sort of functionality over any other backend engineer, especially one who is familiar with agent-assisted development?

Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky . You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs. It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality. Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understan…

  > It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.
At $PREV_JOB, we had physical Point-of-Sales systems as well as a mobile app, and provided multi-merchant marketplace functionality with things like disbursement reports and support for multiple bank accounts for vendors.

I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the most complex payment system I've worked on in my career.

But that's not a job title, it's just part of "make the app work"

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#14

Post by simonw »

gavinray wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky . You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs. It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality. Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understan…

> It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality. At $PREV_JOB, we had physical Point-of-Sales systems as well as a mobile app, and provided multi-merchant marketplace functionality with things like disbursement reports and support for multiple bank accounts for vendors. I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the m…

At my $PREV_JOB we would have called you a payments engineer for that.

I don't think AI Engineer is an exclusive job title. If anything, coding agents are pushing us all to become generalists much more so than before.

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#15

Post by simonw »

gavinray wrote: post #12
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "They wanted an engineer to build a chatbox that called ChatGPT with company documents as prompt context" fits the term "AI Engineer", personally - see https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer which uses it for "applied" AI.

You don't call someone who integrates the Twilio API a "Twilio Engineer", or Mailchimp a "Mailchimp engineer" Integrating third-party libraries to build an application is a significant chunk of the work in any SaaS product and the expectation is you can read the vendor docs and figure it out

I think the difference here is that it's possible to know bowering there is to know about the Twilio API. Read the docs, build a few things and you can consider yourself to have mastered that entirely.

Nobody on earth can tell you that they've "mastered" the art of building software on top of LLMs.

They're weird. They don't behave like other APIs. They're non-deterministic and unpredictable and not even the people who created them fully understand what they can and cannot do.

(For one thing, if someone claims to have mastered LLMs ask them how they would 100% protect against prompt injection attacks...)

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#17

Post by janalsncm »

simonw wrote: post #6

I like these definitions: - AI Engineer: an engineer who builds software that makes use of LLMs and other AI models, and maybe trains models (but not required) - Agentic Engineer: an engineer who makes use of AI tools like coding agents when writing software. AI Engineer was quite well established in the last few years to that first meaning, mainly thanks to swyx in 2023: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer - whic…

AI engineer: makes API calls to a hosted LLM.

ML engineer: builds models and deploys them.

Hosted models have eaten a lot of the domain of ML but the difference is pretty clear in industries like recommendation, where LLMs are slower, less accurate, and cannot be personalized, not to mention orders of magnitude more expensive.

Agentic engineer would be someone who builds agents not just someone who uses them. Anyone can use Claude code.

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#18

Post by janalsncm »

Probably the only correct answer is to look at the job description under the title. Job titles in software engineering have always been flexible. What matters is what they actually want you to do. Even better is if you can figure out what problem they’re trying to solve because there can be better ways.

As for whether you should market yourself that way, I personally think your actual experience matters way more because most companies also haven’t hired many “AI engineers” before.

Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

#19

Post by ravenstine »

It doesn't mean anything. The very title "engineer" is a massive scam to begin with, especially in places like the United States where it's neither a protective title or credentialed. Any asshole can call themselves an engineer and nobody bats an eye at the absurdity.

When employers invent these titles like "AI engineer", they're looking for tech geeks who check off the keywords du jour. It's no different from the now defunct "blockchain engineer" of yesteryear. It's about broadcasting a particular skillset without really having anything to do with actual engineering. I guarantee you that the role of an AI engineer at one company will look very different in another – because it's not real.

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