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Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

rfitz.io

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Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#11

Post by rfitz »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

I don't really disagree with anything in this post, but the advice is so basic it could have easily been written by an LLM, and apologies for my jadedness but I've seen like a million other posts with the same advice. The advice is simply: 1. Write detailed prompts. 2. Don't trust generated code output - it must be thoroughly reviewed, and feedback should be given back to the LLM. 3. AIs are very helpful for those le…

No need to apologize for the jadedness at all! I think we're in an era of AI fatigue where every piece of content you see feels like it's AI generated (or assisted). Arguably most points in this post can be looked at as common sense to some degree. I think what I was trying to get across was my mental models and view on AI in tech since I still see a shocking amount of devs who look at it simply as a means to generate code for them and nothing more.

I'm planning on writing more that dives a bit deeper into experimentation I've done as far as tooling, MCP servers, etc that may be a bit more intriguing to those who have already dove into the AI side of things.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#12

Post by rfitz »

ausbah wrote: post #2

it’s really hard to be consistently “excited” about this space when half of the AI companies are proudly proclaiming their commitment to try and automate your job (doubtful but the mantra is suffocating) and the other half are just about increasing your productivity (you get more done at the same pay). i guess some boilerplate is truly automated which is a mild qol improvement

It's definitely easy to get caught up in that and I think for a while I was probably in that headspace, but where the excitement started to set in was the realization that it could be leveraged to reduce the less "fun" parts of my day so I could focus on what I enjoy most. It's not purely a "AI writes code for me" kind of hype (although that's a nice benefit). I spend a lot less time debugging tiny issues hidden in legacy code or sifting through poorly written docs for libs that the codebase depends on, for example. That's a huge win and it lets me focus my time on producing quality work.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#13

Post by rfitz »

datameta wrote: post #3

The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding. I won't regurgitate the common sentiment of it being like pair programming with an oddly spiky profile junior engineer savant. I find my emotions being activated too often in having to recontextualize or reign in or re-orient or repeat. If I wrote code that doesn't work, that is on me. If I have to read code that doesn't work, I didn't write it,…

I can definitely relate to wanting to feel accomplished after a coding session and how AI can sort of strip you of that feeling at times. For me personally, I started to find the joy in the AI + coding relationship once I realized I just had to reframe my thinking a bit.

It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a way I hadn't even thought of or it could be me wanting to learn a new complex architectural pattern I haven't had the time to deep dive but have wanted to. Now I can spin something up and have a base understanding of it in minutes. That's exciting to me more than anything else. In a way, it takes me back to way earlier in my career when every day felt like I was learning something new and cool on the job from more seniors devs. I think as you get more senior and experienced, those "cool" learning moments start to happen a little less, so having AI be able to reignite that is exciting in a lot of ways.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#14

Post by skydhash »

Why are these arguments always the same?

> But with AI, I’m producing more than ever before, with a level of speed, quality, and understanding I’ve never experienced. In many ways, it’s 10x’d me as an engineer.

> The best way I can explain my mindset is that I see AI as a multiplier of myself, not just a tool that does work for me on command

> But more often than not, it’s a sign that the prompt wasn’t clear or specific enough. With better framing, you can guide the model toward a much more useful and accurate response

Etc,…

I long for an essay like Seven habits of effective text editing[0] by Bram Moolenaar with proper arguments made about AI Coding.

[0]: https://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#15

Post by OkayPhysicist »

rozap wrote: post #9
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding. I agree. The way I put it is that it feels like programming has been turned into the job of an editor, when it used to be an author. Of course, editing was always a huge part of programming, probably the biggest part, but I always kinda felt like reviewing and editing was more the "brussel sprouts" part of the job and authoring the "ice cream"…

I've been struggling with the same thing. It's the same reason I didn't really want to go on the management path because it loses the authoring part. But now it seems to be forced on us. That being said, there are lots of brussel sprouts in authoring sometimes - the boilerplate and wrote stuff we've done a billion times. You can make Claude eat those brussel sprouts which is nice. also, very nice analogy, but don't b…

Tangential fun fact!

Good tasting brussel sprouts are a very recent invention. They used to be a lot more bitter, but a new cultivar was engineered in the 90's that all but completely eliminated the bitter notes. Over the next 30 years, pretty much everybody has switched over, so now brussel sprouts are just drastically better than they were when they got the reputation for being gross.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#16

Post by datameta »

rfitz wrote: post #13
datameta wrote: post #3

The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding. I won't regurgitate the common sentiment of it being like pair programming with an oddly spiky profile junior engineer savant. I find my emotions being activated too often in having to recontextualize or reign in or re-orient or repeat. If I wrote code that doesn't work, that is on me. If I have to read code that doesn't work, I didn't write it,…

I can definitely relate to wanting to feel accomplished after a coding session and how AI can sort of strip you of that feeling at times. For me personally, I started to find the joy in the AI + coding relationship once I realized I just had to reframe my thinking a bit. It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a wa…

I still experience what you outline for bootstrapping understanding, or bringing the knowledge horizon closer, so to speak. Part of the learning though is through the vigilance of parsing and correcting.

When I had a small passive circuit in my head that I wanted to one-shot solder on a protoboard and didn't want to get bogged down in KiCAD, talking through it with an AI and repeatedly correcting its understanding really solidified my own. It's like mentoring while being tutored.

So I still see value in use for smaller novel projects, but using LLMs to hit a deadline for production is not something I want to do any longer, for the time being.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#17

Post by jes5199 »

datameta wrote: post #3

The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding. I won't regurgitate the common sentiment of it being like pair programming with an oddly spiky profile junior engineer savant. I find my emotions being activated too often in having to recontextualize or reign in or re-orient or repeat. If I wrote code that doesn't work, that is on me. If I have to read code that doesn't work, I didn't write it,…

I lost the joy of coding years ago. Using an LLM is novel and interesting, in way that programming hasn't been for over a decade

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#19

Post by ookblah »

datameta wrote: post #3

The more I use LLMs to code, the farther I stray from the joy of coding. I won't regurgitate the common sentiment of it being like pair programming with an oddly spiky profile junior engineer savant. I find my emotions being activated too often in having to recontextualize or reign in or re-orient or repeat. If I wrote code that doesn't work, that is on me. If I have to read code that doesn't work, I didn't write it,…

do you let it generate lots of code before review? i find this feeling you describe if i let it run wild and then have to sit there and figure out what it did and slog through every line.

the happy medium for me is either giving it very defined small tasks that i can review (think small edits or refactors over a few files). or i baby sit it and review every change its about to make. doesn't always pan out but it's basically a super powered auto-complete and i can "steer" it the direction i want. i can validate chunks much faster and it's typically of good quality.

that or i make mental notes of what i want it to fix after the first pass and run it thru again with the edits. in that way it does feel more collaborative and less like reviewing some unknown piece of code from someone else.

Re: Becoming an AI-Native Engineer

#20

Post by tough »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10
worldsayshi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can call it editor or you can call it director/architect. Instead of tapping out characters you spend more time making interesting and more high level decisions.

I totally disagree with this, and that's because (like this blog post says) the output can't be trusted - you still need to review every line of generated code. The recent post I linked in another comment about the Cloudflare OAuth implementation had a catastrophic bug that would have been "game over" if the engineer wasn't such an expert in the field. So it's like an architect but only if you need to triple check ev…

What was the bug, didnt read the CF article
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