An AI Engineer is just a mid level experienced SWE who wants to be hired in 2025-26.
If you did not get the above statement, people who changed their title to "AI Engineer" found it more easy to get jobs, at least from what I have seen.
Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Anyone can use Claude code" I'll happily push back against that. Using Claude Code and similar tools effectively is way, way harder than people expect. Anyone can pick up a guitar and strum the strings, but it takes a whole lot of work to actually get good with it.
> I'll happily push back against that. Using Claude Code and similar tools effectively is way, way harder than people expect.
No it's actually not that difficult. Even if you are not a "prompt engineer" you will get out what is needed from claude if you use simple logic (no need to be technical). In fact this whole "Prompt Engineering" scam will go extinct soon, as SOTA LLM's already catching up on most edge cases and prompting issues.
> Anyone can pick up a guitar and strum the strings, but it takes a whole lot of work to actually get good with it.
Really the wrong analogy here. You are comparing a human who learned guitar through years of practice. When with AI who itself already knows how to play. You're not learning an instrument. You're more like someone who just hired a virtuoso musician. Yes, you need to tell them what song you want,but you don't need to teach them chord progressions. The model already knows the hard part.
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#33[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are definitely regions where "engineer" is protected in such a way that "software engineer" isn't kosher (some provinces in Canada, for example)
I remember it was like that but it was kind of silly. You had "Software Engineers" working alongside "Software Developers" doing exactly the same job. The purpose of the P.Eng. was to protect the public, not people's egos.
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#35In my mind, an AI Engineer builds products on top of LLMs, integrating them into real software (RAG, agents, evals, inference/prompt infra).
Using Claude or Copilot to write your otherwise-normal app isn't that. That's a dev with good tooling, the same way an IDE doesn't make you an "IDE Engineer" or Google a "Search Engineer." You don't title yourself after your tools.
Most of the LinkedIn relabels are that second group borrowing the title. Nothing wrong with using AI in your day to day, especially when you understand the concepts underneath, know what it does well, and know what it doesn't. But that and "makes use of LLMs in what they build" still aren't the same job.
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#36[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#37[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#38“AI Engineer” is already out-of-date. You need to be an “AI GTM engineer”.
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#39It 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…
this kind of gatekeeping is cringe
yea i know there are PE exams and certs
doesn’t change the fact that it’s cringe
no amount of down votes can convince me otherwise
Re: Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?
#40Doesn't matter, the title means nothing. What you can do does. If you can do something, does it matter what your title is?