Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We might all be AI engineers now

yasint.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 384 posts

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#181

Post by t43562 »

kseniamorph wrote: post #176

Saw 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 p…

Without writing some code how will people really know what's right? I've supervised people before - one thinks one knows best and pontificates at them and then when one actually starts working in the codebase onself many issues become clear. If you never get your hands dirty your decisions will tend off towards badness.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#182

Post by 9rx »

bambax wrote: post #93
jstanley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is overstated. People always learn the things they need to learn. Were people clutching their pearls about how programmers were going to lack the fundamentals of assembly language after compilers came along? Probably, but it turned out fine. People who need to program in assembly language still do. People who need to touch low-level things probably understand some of it but not as deeply. Most of…

I don't think the comparison (that's often made) between AI and compilers is valid though. A compiler is deterministic. It's a function; it transforms input into output and validates it in the process. If the input is incorrect it simply throws an error. AI doesn't validate anything, and transforms a vague input into a vague output, in a non-deterministic way. A compiler can be declared bug-free, at least in theory.…

> A compiler is deterministic.

Not usually they aren't. They can be made to be, but it requires extra effort and tradeoffs. Hence why there is a lot of work put into reproducible builds — something you would get for free if compilers were actually always deterministic.

Unless you are taking a wider view and recognizing that, fundamentally, nothing running on a computer can be nondeterministic, which is definitely true.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#183

Post by ontouchstart »

I am running local offline small models in the old fashioned REPL style, without any agentic features. One prompt at a time.

Instead of asking for answers, I ask for specific files to read or specific command line tools with specific options. I pipe the results to a file and then load it into the CLI session. Then I turn these commands into my own scripts and documentation (in Makefile).

I forbid the model wandering around to give me tons of irrelevant markdown text or generated scripts.

I ask straight questions and look for straight answers. One line at a time, one file at a time.

This gives me plenty of room to think what I want and how I get what I want.

Learning what we want and what we need to do to achieve it is the precious learning experience that we don’t want to offload to the machine.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#184

Post by phil21 »

rl3 wrote: post #17
roli64 wrote: post #13

Lost me at "I’m building something right now. I won’t get into the details. You don’t give away the idea."

Perhaps execution is cheap now and ideas aren't? Personally I'm quite pleased with this inversion.

As someone else implied in their comment...

If execution no longer matters, then what possible ideas exist out there that both are highly valuable as well as only valuable to the first mover? If the second person to see the value in the idea can execute it in a weekend using AI tools, what value is there in the idea to begin with?

In fact the second mover advantage seems to me to be even larger than before. Let someone else get the first version out the door, then you just point your AI bot at the resulting product to copy it in a fraction of the time it took the original person to execute on it.

If anything, ideas seem to be even cheaper to me in this new world. It probably just moves what bits of execution matter even more towards sales and marketing and hype vs. executing on the actual product itself.

I think there might be some interesting spaces here opening up in the IP combined with "physical product" space. Where you need the idea as well as real-world practical manufacturing skills in order to execute. That will still be somewhat of a moat for a little while at least, but mostly at a scale where it's not worth an actual manufacturer from China to spin up a production line to compete with you at scale.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#186

Post by simonw »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #145
nabbed wrote: post #128

I'm glad I am no longer in tech because I just don't want to do this. This is not a dig at AI. If I take this article at face value, AI makes people more productive, assuming they have the taste and knowledge to steer their agents properly. And that's possibly a good thing even though it might have temporary negative side effects for the economy. >But the AI is writing the traversal logic, the hashing layers, the wat…

I'm a developer who was made redundant, and I'm now casting around for an entirely new job because, likewise, I have no interest in working with AI. It sounds boring, and the concept squicks me out, to be honest.

Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at?

I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to know where they end up.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#187

Post by doctorpangloss »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #180
doctorpangloss wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But no amount of politics and charisma will calculate the motions of the planets or put satellites in orbit.

the government invented computers. you need politics to fund all of this. you are talking about triumphs of politics as much as invention. i don't know why you think i am pro influencer or charlatan...

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#188

Post by simonw »

input_sh wrote: post #39
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.

And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones. So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?

That's not how modern LLMs are built. The days of dumping everything on the internet into the training data and crossing your fingers are long past.

Anthropic and OpenAI spent most of 2025 focusing almost expensively on improving the coding abilities of their models, through reinforcement learning combined with additional expert curation of training data.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#189

Post by simonw »

jasomill wrote: post #63
input_sh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones. So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?

In other words, there's probably a market for a model trained on a curated collection of high-quality code.

That is what we have today - it's why Opus 4.5+ and GPT-5.2+ are so much better at driving coding agents than previous models were.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#190

Post by andoando »

sp1nningaway wrote: post #161
wcfrobert wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same there is a few things I never learned and don't care to learn and ultimately it has no greater value to learn.

Like do I really get anything out of learning another framework or how some particular library does something?

Post reply on HN