Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

Post by simonw » Fri, May 29, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #17

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…

Post by thunderfork » Fri, May 29, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

osigurdson wrote: post #21

ravenstine wrote: post #19

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 no…

I don't think you can call yourself an accredited civil, mechanical, etc., engineer, even in the US. However, you can call yourself a software engineer nearly anywhere because it isn't the same thing - no regulatory body is going to stop people from making a website.

Post by Songjinhao » Fri, May 29, 2026, 3:44 AM UTC

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…

Post by Armonsrer » Fri, May 29, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

Post by przemekk » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #25

Engineering involves assuming liability. I can't see how anyone can rationally assume liability for the output of any current LLM or anything likely to emerge in the near future.