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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

ivanturkovic.com

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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#151

Post by whstl »

EliRivers wrote: post #129

"the skills that the new engineering landscape actually requires: system design, architectural thinking, product reasoning, security awareness, and the ability to critically evaluate code they did not write." These, surely, are the skills they always needed? Anyone who didn't have these skills was little more than a human chatgpt already, receiving prompts and simply presenting the results to someone for evaluation.

That’s a great point, but yes: a lot of devs were nothing more than a glorified LLM and during reviews were just an expensive linter. Reality is catching up to those.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#152

Post by turlockmike »

The role of an engineer is to produce software that probably works. If you are producing more bugs it's because you're skipping provability. AI is also really good at writing tests and doing test-driven development You can get 100% branching coverage. You use a secondary LLM to review the work and make sure everything follows best practices.

LLMs Can accelerate you if you use best practices and focus on provability and quality, but if you produce slop LLMs will help you produce slop faster.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#153

Post by cactusplant7374 »

sh3rl0ck wrote: post #117
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I think there's a reward for finesse too. As you mentioned, scope definition and constraints play a major role but ensuring that you don't just go for the first slop result but refine it pays off. It helps to have a very clear mental model of feature constraints that doesn't fall prey to scope creep.

There's also a reward for not over thinking it and letting AI bring the solutions to you. The outcomes are better when it's a question, answer, and execution session.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#154

Post by polynomial »

altmanaltman wrote: post #18
Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

It is almost 90% generated using AI text. So many paragraphs to say basically nothing at all. Like look at this paragraph: > Junior engineers have traditionally learned by doing the simpler, more task-oriented work. Fixing small bugs. Writing straightforward features. Implementing well-defined tickets. This hands-on work built the foundational understanding that eventually allowed them to take on more complex challen…

Classic LLM construction.

5 sentence paragraph. First sentence is parataxis claim. Followed by 3 examples in sentence fragments, missing verbs, that familiar cadence. Then the final sentence, in this case also missing a verb.

Pure AI slop.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#156

Post by bcooke »

oytis wrote: post #137
gf263 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone point out something like: ai makes every sentence count. There’s no building or allowing a point to breathe. Every sentence is an axiom to get the meaning across, and its so grating

It's an interesting way to view it, because what happens in fact is likely the opposite - AI is asked to expand a few bullet points into a blog post

Maybe that's why the writing feels so terrible. The AI is attempting to maximize every sentence while simultaneously expanding on just a few actually meaningful points. And the net result of that dissonance is this rage-inducing vapidity. It's the written equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#157

Post by ipaddr »

hypfer wrote: post #108
RivieraKid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.

Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place? This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.

It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#158

Post by daemonk »

It's a different skillset and way of thinking. Engineers tend to think vertically deep on technical problems. With AI, you have to think horizontally broad and vertically up on the architectural problem. The trick is to be comfortable relegating the details to AI.

One concrete example of this realization was when I was researching how to optimize my claude code environment with agents, skills, etc. I read a lot of technical documents on how these supplemental plugins work and how to create them. After an hour of reading through all this, I realized I could just ask Claude to optimize the environment for me given the project context. So I did, and it was able to point out plugins, skills, agents that I can install or create. I gave it permission to create them and it all worked out.

This was a case of where I should not think more technically deeper, but at a more "meta" level to define the project enough for Claude to figure out how to optimize the environment. Whether that gave real gains is another question of course. But I have anecdotally observed faster results and less token usage due context caching and slightly more tools-directed prompts.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#159

Post by MattyRad »

> One engineer captured this shift perfectly in a widely shared essay, describing how AI transformed the engineering role from builder to reviewer.

I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad.

My trust is vacated.

This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#160

Post by manofmanysmiles »

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers."

2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding.

This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

Of course I don't think it's a binary decision.

Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.

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