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At first, I was not convinced then I thought I would be replaced, now I'm convinced the AI slop is unstoppable and having the hard skills will quickly be invaluable
> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. Ah, but you see, without any promise of pudding: why eat the meat? I do the 'human engineering' part only to do... the rest of the engineering.
At first, I was not convinced then I thought I would be replaced, now I'm convinced the AI slop is unstoppable and having the hard skills will quickly be invaluable
AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.
I don't think LLMs were ever meant to completely replace human engineering, at least in the way we think of engineering as a craft. But the truth is the world is changing, and with LLMs/AI, the goalposts are changing, too. With massive economies of scale and huge output, the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output.
Put it another way, the post-AI world considers a reduction of quality to be an acceptable tradeoff for the massive short-term gains. Moreover, although quantity over quality is not exactly a new concept, what AI does is magnify and distill that concept as a prime directive.
Code doesn't have to work well to be profitable given how cheaply in can be produced, and that's a general effect of technology that can reach global audiences, and AI is the apex of that technology.
I don't think there is a nuanced view: AI is an all-around bad thing and its positives in the short-term will be vastly dwarfed by its negatives except for those who have become specialized at concentrating wealth at the expense of the common good.
Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?
> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. Ah, but you see, without any promise of pudding: why eat the meat? I do the 'human engineering' part only to do... the rest of the engineering.
'human engineering' here isn't social engineering. I think they're referring to aspects of engineering that LLMs are still incapable of - like design simplification.
edit: The [currently] Dead reply below is a touch ironic. I rest my case. Great sell, worth the squeeze.
At first, I was not convinced then I thought I would be replaced, now I'm convinced the AI slop is unstoppable and having the hard skills will quickly be invaluable
The people who write AI slop would have written human slop, they're just much faster now, and the people who are really good tend to be so set in their ways that they resist AI when they could quadruple their productivity if they just put half as much time into learning how to use it as they put into their current skillset.
I was hoping the AI could replace me, maybe the IA would fulfill my boss deadlines
I use LLMs for annoying shit that used to take an inordinate amount of time. For example an analyst gives me a CSV, it has some data clean up issues, eventually it needs to become a series of SQL inserts. What was a day of script writing becomes 15 minutes of prompt engineering to clean up the CSV and convert it into the proper statements. Massive time savings! I believe one can vibe code a basic app or script. Like…
But that has a flip-side too: analysts are more likely to give you CSVs with more issues because they know you can clean it up with AI. And pretty soon people will put less care in general in what they do until something goes wrong with this translate-with-AI paradigm.