No we can't, because the teams are being reduced in headcount to the few lucky ones allowed to wear the AI hat.
We might all be AI engineers now
171–180 of 384 posts
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#172Strangely we never hear gushing pieces on how great gcc is. If you have to advertise that much or recruit people with AI mania, perhaps your product isn't that great.
Maybe when they've also been doing their thing for almost 40 years, people will be past this phase for LLMs, too ;-)
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#173A 2026 AI Engineer is a 1996 Software Architect. I don't need to be the one manually implementing the individual widgets of a system, I can delegate their implementation to developers (agents).
I'm being a little facetious, but I don't think it's far off the mark from what TFA is saying, and it matches my experience over the past few months. The worst architects we ever worked with were the ones who couldn't actually implement anything from scratch. Like TFA says, if you've got the fundamentals down and you want to see how far you can go with these new tools, play the role of architect for a change and let the agents fly.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#174"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…
It is uncertain what will be valuable in the future at the rate things are changing.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#175"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…
It always comes down to economics and then the person and their attitude towards themselves. Some things are worth learning deeply, in other cases the easy / fast solution is what the situation calls for. I've thought recently that some kinds of 'learning' with AI are not really that different from using Cliffs Notes back in the day. Sometimes getting the Cliffs Notes summary was the way to get a paper done OR a way…
So I've actually been putting more effort into deliberate practice since I started using AI in programming.
I've been a fan of Zed Shaw's method for years, of typing out interesting programs by hand. But I've been appreciating it even more now, as a way to stave off the feeling of my brain melting :)
The gross feeling I have if I go for too long without doing cardio, is a similar feeling to when I go for too long without actually writing a substantial amount of code myself.
I think that the feeling of making a sustained effort is itself something necessary and healthy, and rapidly disappearing from the world.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#176Saw the edit: I think that clarification was important.
The core point resonates with me personally. The shift isn't about writing less code, it's about where the real judgment lives. Knowing what to build, how to decompose a problem, which patterns to reach for - and critically, when the model is confidently wrong. Without that foundation you're not moving faster, you're just making bad decisions faster.
The scope point resonates too. Small, well-defined tasks with verifiable output is where agents actually shine.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#177> I’m shipping in hours what used to take days. Not prototypes. Real, structured, well-architected software.
> If I don’t understand what it’s doing, it doesn’t ship. That’s non-negotiable.
Holy LinkedIn
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#178[dead]
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#179"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…
I don't know, most shit I learned programming (and subsequently get paid for) is meaningless arcana. For example, Kubernetes. And for you, it's Windows APIs.
For programming in general, most learning is worthless. This is where I disagree with you. If you belong to a certain set of cultures, you overindex on this idea that math (for example) is the best way to solve problems, that you must learn all this stuff by this certain pedagogy, and that the people who are best at this are the best at solving problems, which of course is not true. This is why we have politics, and why we have great politicians who hail from cultures that are underrepresented in high levels of math study, because getting elected and having popular ideas and convincing people is the best way to solve way more problems people actually have than math. This isn't to say that procedural thinking isn't valuable. It's just that, well, jokes on you. ChatGPT will lose elections. But you can have it do procedural thinking pretty well, and what does the learning and economic order look like now? I reject this form of generalization, but there is tremendous schadenfreude about, well the math people are destroying their own relevance.
All that said, my actual expertise, people don't pay for. Nobody pays for good game design or art direction (my field). They pay because you know Unity and they don't. They can't tell (and do not pay for) the difference between a good and bad game.
Another way of stating this for the average CRUD developer is, most enterprise IT projects fail, so yeah, the learning didn't really matter anyway. It's not useful to learn how to deliver better failed enterprise IT project, other than to make money.
One more POV: the effortlessness of agentic programming makes me more sympathetic to anti intellectualism. Most people do not want to learn anything, including people at fancy colleges, including your bosses and your customers, though many fewer in the academic category than say in the corporate world. If you told me, a chatbot could achieve in hours what would take a world expert days or weeks, I would wisely spend more time playing with my kids and just wait. The waiters are winning. Even in game development (cultural product development generally). It's better to wait for these tools to get more powerful than to learn meaningless arcana.
Re: We might all be AI engineers now
#180"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…
I don't know, most shit I learned programming (and subsequently get paid for) is meaningless arcana. For example, Kubernetes. And for you, it's Windows APIs. For programming in general, most learning is worthless. This is where I disagree with you. If you belong to a certain set of cultures, you overindex on this idea that math (for example) is the best way to solve problems, that you must learn all this stuff by thi…
Convincing / coercing a bunch of slaves to build a pyramid takes a leader.
But no amount of politics and charisma will calculate the motions of the planets or put satellites in orbit.
A nation needs more than just influencers and charlatans.