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

21–30 of 384 posts

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#21

Post by Cthulhu_ »

input_sh wrote: post #9
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

Quite frankly, if AI can write better code than most of your engineers "hundreds of times", then your hiring team is doing something terribly wrong.

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.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#22

Post by noemit »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> The problem is: you can’t justify this throughput to someone who doesn’t understand real software engineering. They see the output and think “well the AI did it.” No. The AI executed it. I designed it. I knew what to ask for, how to decompose the problem, what patterns to use, when the model was going off track, and how to correct it. That’s not prompting. That’s engineering. That’s the “money quote,” for me. Often…

There are two types of engineers who use AI:

- Ones who see it generated something bad, and blame the AI.

- Ones who see it generated something bad, and revert it and try to prompt better, with more clarity and guidance.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#23

Post by codemog »

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."

It’s kind of funny seeing all the AI hype guys talking about their 10 OpenClaw instances all running doing work and when you ask what it is, you can never get a straight answer..

For the record though, I love agentic coding. It deals with the accumulated cruft of software for me.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#24

Post by brabel »

pydry wrote: post #11
noemit wrote: post #3

Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…

>But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. Are you serious? I've been hearing this constantly. since mid 2025. The gaslighting over AI is really something else. Ive also never seen jobs advertised before whose job was to lobby skeptical engineers over about how to engage in technical work. This is entirely new. There is a priesthood developing o…

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.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#25

Post by bambax »

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 at all, and think developers are interchangeable.

The other problem is, how do you develop those instincts when you're starting up, now that AI is a better junior coder than most junior coders? This is something one needs to think about hard as a society. We old farts are going to be fine, but we're eventually going to die (retire first, if we're lucky; then die).

What comes after? How do we produce experts in the age of AI?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#26

Post by jstanley »

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…

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 us never need to worry about it.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#27

Post by kirito1337 »

nbvkappowqpeop wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: post #5

> Building systems that supervise AI agents, training models, wiring up pipelines where the AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking. Honestly? I’m having more fun than ever. I'm sure some people are having fun that way. But I'm also sure some people don't like to play with systems that produce fuzzy outputs and break in unexpected moments, even though overall they are a net win. It's almost as if you're deali…

I'm just an old school programmer who loves writing code, and the recent AI developments have just taken the most fun part away from me.

fr, like in 2020 I started to learn programming in C/C++ at 9 and in 2023 when the AI bubble just went on, it feels like I did it all for nothing

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#28

Post by rimmontrieu »

> But guided? The models can write better code than most developers. That’s the part people don’t want to sit with. When guided.

Where do you draw the line between just enough guidance vs too much hand holding to an agent? At some point, wouldn't it be better to just do it yourself and be done with the project (while also build your muscle memory, experiences and the mental model for future projects, just like tons of regular devs have done in the past)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#29

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

noemit wrote: post #22
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> The problem is: you can’t justify this throughput to someone who doesn’t understand real software engineering. They see the output and think “well the AI did it.” No. The AI executed it. I designed it. I knew what to ask for, how to decompose the problem, what patterns to use, when the model was going off track, and how to correct it. That’s not prompting. That’s engineering. That’s the “money quote,” for me. Often…

There are two types of engineers who use AI: - Ones who see it generated something bad, and blame the AI. - Ones who see it generated something bad, and revert it and try to prompt better, with more clarity and guidance.

Three types:

- Ones that use it as a “pair partner,” as opposed to an employee.

Thanks for the implicit insult. That was helpful.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#30

Post by q3k »

codemog wrote: post #23
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."

It’s kind of funny seeing all the AI hype guys talking about their 10 OpenClaw instances all running doing work and when you ask what it is, you can never get a straight answer.. For the record though, I love agentic coding. It deals with the accumulated cruft of software for me.

The work is mysterious and important.
Post reply on HN