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We might all be AI engineers now

yasint.dev

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#161

Post by sp1nningaway »

wcfrobert wrote: post #140
egl2020 wrote: post #113

"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Window…

My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways. Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don't care as much about.

I've managed to go my whole career using regex and never fully grokking it, and now I finally feel free to never learn!

I've also wanted to play with C and Raylib for a long time and now I'm confident in coding by hand and struggling with it, I just use LLMs as a backstop for when I get frustrated, like a TA during lab hours.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#162

Post by slopinthebag »

yanis_t wrote: post #35

They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs. This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective. AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction. Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the sam…

I don't think it's valid to reduce the act of creating software to an assembly line, especially with Amdahl's law.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#163

Post by voxleone »

I’ve always designed systems along the classic path: requirements → use cases → schematization. With AI, I continue in the same spirit (structure precedes prompting), but now the foundational layer of my systems is axioms and constraints, and the architecture emerges through structured prompts. Any AI on the shift is an aide in building systems that are logically grounded. This is where the “all of us as AI engineers” claim becomes subtle. Yes, anyone can generate code, but real engineering remains about judgment and structure. AI amplifies throughput, but the bottleneck is still problem framing, abstraction choice, and trade-off reasoning.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#164

Post by slopinthebag »

jjmarr wrote: post #98

I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before. Now I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole organization. That would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the syntax and evaluate competing options. Now I can get sccache working in a day, find it doesn't scale well, and replace it with recc + buildbarn. And ask the AI questi…

> that would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the syntax

This is hyperbole, right? In what world does it take 3 months to learn the syntax to anything? 3 days is more than enough time.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#165

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #25

I agree wholeheartedly with all that is said in this article. When guided , AI amplifies the productivity of experts immensely. There are two problems left, though. One is, laypersons don't understand the difference between "guided" and "vibe coded". This shouldn't matter, but it does, because in most organizations managers are laypersons who don't know anything about coding whatsoever, aren't interested by the topic…

[deleted]

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#167

Post by jinko-niwashi »

bambax wrote: post #25

I agree wholeheartedly with all that is said in this article. When guided , AI amplifies the productivity of experts immensely. There are two problems left, though. One is, laypersons don't understand the difference between "guided" and "vibe coded". This shouldn't matter, but it does, because in most organizations managers are laypersons who don't know anything about coding whatsoever, aren't interested by the topic…

The instincts can absolutely be developed faster with AI — if you set it up right. I work with an AI partner daily and one thing I've noticed is that it's a brutal mirror: it exposes gaps in your thinking immediately because it does exactly what you tell it, not what you meant.

That feedback loop, hundreds of times a day, compresses years of learning into months. The catch is you need guardrails — tests that fail when the AI drifts, review cycles you can't skip, architecture constraints it must respect.

That's what builds the instincts: not the AI doing the work for you, but the AI showing you where your understanding breaks down, fast enough that you actually learn from it. Just-In-Time Learning.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#169

Post by ericd »

pydry wrote: post #40
brabel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote code by hand for 20 years. Now I use AI for nearly all code. I just can’t compete in speed and thoroughness. As the post says, you must guide the AI still. But if you think you can continue working without AI in a competitive industry, I am absolutely sure you will eventually have a very bad time.

>I just can’t compete in speed and thoroughness I certainly know engineers for which this is true but unfortunately they were never particularly thorough or fast to begin with. I believe you can tell which way the wind is blowing by looking at open source. Other than being flooded with PRs high profile projects have not seen a notable difference - certainly no accelerated enhancements. there has definitely been an ex…

Maybe the bottleneck for most high profile open source is PR review and not coding?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#170

Post by andai »

sn0wflak3s wrote: post #91
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #6

This essay somehow sounds worse than AI slop, like ChatGPT did a line of coke before writing this out. I use AI everyday for coding. But if someone so obviously puts this little effort into their work that they put out into the world, I don’t think I trust them to do it properly when they’re writing code.

I wrote it myself. But the irony isn't lost on me. "Who did what" is kind of the whole point of the article. Appreciate the feedback.

Yeah, I came here to ask if you're Vibe Writing as well ;)

I wasn't quite sure though. Sometimes it's clearly GPT, sometimes clearly Claude, and this article was like a blend.

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