We might all be AI engineers now • Hacker News Board

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#281

Post by tern » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:04 AM UTC

krona wrote: post #117

tern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

I don't mean to be rude, but you write like a chatbot. This makes sense, to be honest.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just thinking yesterday ... that because the majority of reading I do now is output from chatbots, I'm starting to think and write like a chatbot.

A little terrifying. Probably the solution is to read 19th century literature before bed.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#282

Post by overgard » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

thunky wrote: post #269

archagon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build ne…

> I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work And others see too much value in their work.

Yes, we should punish care and craftsmanship. That's a recipe for success.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#283

Post by 20k » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

mgraczyk wrote: post #277

20k wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mentality is fundamentally why I think AI is not that useful, it completely underscores everything that's wrong with software engineering and what makes a very poor quality senior developer I'll write an application without AI that has to be maintained for 5 years with an ever evolving featureset, and you can write your own with AI, and see which codebase is easiest to maintain, the most productive to add new fe…

Sure let's do it. I am pretty confident mine will be more maintainable, because I am an extremely good software engineer, AI is a powerful tool, and I use AI very effectively I would literally claim that with AI I can work faster and produce higher quality output than any other software engineer who is not using AI. Soon that will be true for all software engineers using AI.

I'm curious, have you ever worked on a single software project for more than 5 years?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#284

Post by tern » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #68

tern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some vari…

You seem to be saying two things. For me, the answer is: I've been somewhere in the middle—working on real projects, sure. I've been employed as a software developer in the past, and I've worked with startups and corporations. I've also worked in academia.

Have I spent years, personally grinding directly in the belly of the beast? No. I managed a small dev team in small startup once. Yeah, it's not the same thing. I know I don't know everything.

Yes, I'm familiar with the critiques of capitalism. I went to art school. Art school is like studying philosophy, but only the social critique parts (for better or worse).

Yes, I'm aware that I'm being ingested by machinery that serves capital. I've read Nick Land.

We're all doing our best to navigate this, but don't forget that poets, mathematicians, artists, and musicians really exist. They contact the cold realities of real life too, and many of them still succeed, still live beautiful lives. And no matter how bad things are, they still write history in the long-run.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#285

Post by overgard » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

tern wrote: post #34

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…

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…

So from my perspective as a professional programmer, my feeling is good on you, like, you're empowered to make things and you're making them. It reminds me of people making PHP sites when the web was young and it was easier to do things.

I think where I get really irritated with the discourse is when people find something that works for them, kinda, and they're like "WELL THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE HAS TO DO NOW!" I wouldn't care if I felt like "oh, just a rando on the internet has a bad opinion", the reason this subject bothers me is words do matter and when enough people are thoughtlessly on the hype train it starts creating a culture shift that creates a lot of harm. And eventually cooler heads prevail, but it can create a lot of problems in the meantime. (Look at the damage crypto did!)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#286

Post by 20k » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #280

20k wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a strong error, you have no idea if it works or if it just happens to work

If you're good at programming you can usually tell exactly why it worked or didn't work. That's how we've all worked before coding agents came along too - you don't blindly assume the snippet you pasted off StackOverflow will work, you try it and poke at it and use it to build a firm mental model of whether it's the right thing or not.

Sure. A big part of how I'd know that the function I'm calling does what I think it does, is by reading the source documentation associated with it

Does it have any threading preconditions? Any weird quirks? Any strange UB? That's stuff you can't find out just by testing. You can ask the LLM, but then you have to read the docs anyway to check its answer

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#287

Post by overgard » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

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.

Believe me mate, everyone has ideas. Even if you have a good one I guarantee a thousand other people have thought of it first.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#288

Post by overgard » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

sn0wflak3s wrote: post #86

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."

Fair enough. I know how that reads. But when anyone with a laptop and a subscription can ship production software in a weekend, the architecture and the idea start to matter a lot more. The technical details in the post are real. I just can't share the what yet. Take it or leave it.

I've heard this a thousand times and I have not once seen a person give an example of this actually happening. I'm more likely to believe the crocodiles coming out of sewer pipes urban legend at this point.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#289

Post by gzoo » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

"But guided? The models can write better code than most developers. " <- THIS PART! I get that "senior" developers feel a certain kind of way about it but the truth is that AI really DOES write better code than most developers. I'm not saying ALL developers but AI (at least in my experience with Claude) does the "coding" part much better. They might not be ready to get it perfect yet but they're getting closer every couple of months. It won't be long now. This scares people. I prefer to embrace this AI movement. There is no stopping it no matter how much people complain about it. We all know that. What I'm realizing is that instead of spending all that time actually WRITING the code I have more time to THINK about what I want to do. It reduces the cognitive load :)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#290

Post by dboreham » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

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…

> something stupid an AI did in their codebase

I have LLMs write code all day almost every day and these days I really haven't seen this happen. The odd thing here and there (e.g. LLM finds two instances of the same error path in code, decides to emit a log message in one place and throw an exception in the other place) but nothing just plain out wrong recently.