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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#31

Post by input_sh »

theshrike79 wrote: post #18
input_sh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "most engineers" not "most engineers we've hired". But also "most engineers" aren't very good. AIs know tricks that the average "I write code for my dayjob" person doesn't know or frankly won't bother to learn.

Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers".

In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers. Maybe you can claim that it's better than 60% of engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel engineers tend to not publish their works online for it to be used as training data, but for every one of those you have a bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a living putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done using code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself immediately and say that it's about 40%.

The same goes for every other output: it's gonna make the world's most average article, the most average song in a genre and so on. You can nudge it to be slightly better than the average with great effort, but no, you absolutely cannot make it better than most.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#32

Post by noemit »

javadhu wrote: post #10
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 agree on the curiosity part, I have a non CS background but I have learned to program just out of curiosity. This led me to build production applications which companies actually use and this is before the AI era. Now, with AI I feel like I have an assistant engineer with me who can help me build exciting things.

I'm currently teaching a group of very curious non-technical content creators at one of the firms I consult at. I set up Codex for them, created the repo to have lots of hand-holding built in - and they took off. It's been 4 weeks and we already have 3 internal tools deployed, one of which eliminated the busy work of another team so much that they now have twice the capacity. These are all things 'real' engineers and product managers could have done, but just empowering people to solve their own problems is way faster. Today, several of them came to me and asked me to explain what APIs are (They want to use the google workspace APIs for something)

I wrote out a list of topics/key words to ask AI about and teach themselves. I've already set up the integration in an example app I will give them, and I literally have no idea what they are going to build next, but I'm .. thrilled. Today was the first moment I realized, maybe these are the junior engineers of the future. The fact that they have nontechnical backgrounds is a huge bonus - one has a PhD in Biology, one a masters in writing - they bring so much to the process that a typical engineering team lacks. Thinking of writing up this case study/experience because it's been a highlight of my career.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#33

Post by jruz »

I find really sad how people are so stubborn to dismiss AI as a slop generator. I completely agree with the author, once you spend the time building a good enough harness oh boy you start getting those sweet gains, but it takes a lot of time and effort but is absolutely worth it.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#34

Post by tern »

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 design, compiler optimization, and open source politics in my free time.

There are many bits of tacit knowledge I don't have. I know I don't have them, because I have that knowledge in other domains. I know that I don't know what I don't know about being a "real engineer."

But I also know what taste is. I know what questions to ask. I know the magic words, and where to look for answers.

For people like me, this feels like an insane golden age. I have no shortage of ideas, and now the only thing I have is a shortage of hands, eyes, and on a good week, tokens.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#35

Post by yanis_t »

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 same amount of bread with only 5 people.

You have a choice: fire 5 people, or produce 2,000 loaves per month. But does the city really need that many loaves?

To make matters worse, all your competitors also have the same semi-automatic ovens...

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#36

Post by miningape »

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.

- Ones who see it generated something bad, and realise it'd be faster to just hand fix the issues than babysit an LLM

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#37

Post by holyra »

jruz wrote: post #33

I find really sad how people are so stubborn to dismiss AI as a slop generator. I completely agree with the author, once you spend the time building a good enough harness oh boy you start getting those sweet gains, but it takes a lot of time and effort but is absolutely worth it.

Personally, I dismiss AI, mainly agenetic ones, because of its environmental impact. I hope that one day everyone will be held accountable for it.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#38

Post by holyra »

what about the environmental impact of AI, especially agentic AI? I keep reading praise for AI on the orange site, but its environmental impact is rarely discussed. It seems that everyone has already adopted this technology, which is destroying our world a little more.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#39

Post by input_sh »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #21
input_sh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#40

Post by pydry »

brabel wrote: post #24
pydry wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>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 explosion of new projects, though, most of dubious quality.

Spikes and research are definitely cheaper now.

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