Everybody knows you don't go full AI engineer.
Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
31–40 of 125 posts
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#32But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?
I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?
There's clearly a range of outcomes, from the people pushing the envelope in system performance (look at the state of networking ASICs and the code to drive them) to people adopting hyper-complex frameworks for cloud orchestration and job coordination that turn a few screens of code into system so slow and complex it needs a team to maintain it. It's all happening at once, and it's probably ok. Keep in mind, knowing how to write assembly and knowing how to get good performance out of a CPU are two different things, modern chips are insanely complicated and the mental model is a long way from the days of the 386 or 68030 (let alone pre-MMU computing).
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#33I’m forcing myself to write code.
This idea of reviewing an architecture that you never coded is just a fantasy.
At some point in time, me and a lot of people, thought that using Redux was a great idea until we had to manage verbosity and middlewares. Now we had to deal with the consequences of our decisions and we learned.
I also think this article is just a rage bait
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#34But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?
I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?
This analogy is always weird to me, the change your talking about was still deterministic. Switching from programming to describing programming and having a machine make a best guess is not a deterministic shift as previously happened.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Slowly your brain just gets trained to mid thinking like an LLM Regression to the mean. I am doing a lot of the code reviews on my team and I can see that LLMs have a hard time with OOP (or are perhaps specifically guided to avoid) and writes a lot of `private static` utility functions. A lot of duplicated small utilities that can end up becoming a maintenance nightmare should the behavior need to be normalized/fix…
can you say which llms you're using? have you tried different ones and how were they?
Team is a mix; I'm personally using Codex, gpt-5.5 high fast + Claude Opus 4.6 (occasionally Sonnet 4.6).
Mix of CLI (Codex) and GH Copilot (if I want active line selection).
We have a set of custom skills and knowledge base as well.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#36I’ve been on and off and on the bandwagon on this. My current verdict. When used properly, and if you actually read the code, pushback when needed and don’t get approval fatigue, and also practice hand coding here and there, you can definitely get immense productivity boosts while not compromising on quality. The issue is blindly accepting AI code, architecture, “are you sure this is prod ready?” “Ok ship it” is not…
How many people actually have this discipline?
I think most people dont want that discipline either. engineers in the west live in a world of convenience. The loss of discipline is almost expected. Apart from those who really love it and take pride.
And we’ve seen that outsourcing to low cost regions = no discipline.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#37With all the people saying that you're going to have problems because the LLM is not good at refactoring or large code bases or OOP, etc. the point may be that if you're working to develop skills, an LLM herder might be a good one. Even if the models are almost, but not quite, good enough yet - they will be.
When looking for a career move you might want to focus on the trajectory more than the current state.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#38I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…
> You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative
Not really. You write the specs, you write the architecture. You ask the model to implement your solution.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#39I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…
If you have a very specific decision in mind, there's no need to ask the LLM at all and hope it guesses it. Depending on how sure I am, I will either explain what I want vaguely, or even phrasing things as questions, or be direct and inflexible. It ends up writing the code I would.
It's not all that different from what happens if I am delegating a larger task to another human being. The only actual difference there is that wit a person, I'd rather underspecify as to give them ore of a sense of freedom and opportunity for growth, while the LLM isn't learning anything, so, if anything, it's easier.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#40Is anyone doing this who is not making CRUD web-apps or other very common types of programs for which there is masses of training data to copy from the net?
I tend to do oddball stuff (eg. software for custom arcade machines, AR games) and any forays I've made into AI code have made it seem like a total waste of time for me. (ie. I will spend much longer trying to get AI do to a shitty job, compared to just doing it myself)