AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

Post by DrewADesign » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #56

DrewADesign wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctor sounds like Nurse, which sounds like applying bandages and taking temperatures. Physicist sounds like Lab Technician, which sounds like managing samples. Electrical Engineer sounds like Electrician, which sounds like installing a bunch of wire. Stunt Driver sounds like Uber Driver which sounds like pushing pedals and turning a wheel. It’s fun to pretend the world is much simpler than it is.

Much less emasculating than accepting that all that weird tech mumbo jumbo that those overpaid senior engineers babble about actually has a deeper meaning and is not just there to artificially slow down the all important company growth!

Post by witx » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #24

witx wrote: post #5

"Engineers" Of course not, all these sloppers are doing is training the models so at the eyes of management they are good enough for a replacement. The ones who stay will have 10x more work.

If they can actually deliver 10x more work: well, that's how economic progress looks like.

Post by classified » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #14

When all the prompts are by AI, and all the commits by AI, and all the use by AI,only then will corporations realize that..something ..

Post by Chrise_N » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

marcyb5st wrote: post #21

muldvarp wrote: post #11

I have yet to hear a single convincing argument by a person that works in software why they can't be replaced.

I am pretty familiar with a 500k LOC codebase. If for every feature request/bug the agent has to go through a lot of it, spend a gazillion thinking tokens for understanding what it needs to do, plan, and then execute (assuming it gets it right) given the current cost of tokens I argue I am often more cost effective. In fact, I believe that the most cost effective way is a collab of human+agent. Ie giving the agent di…

Post by gobdovan » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

Doch88 wrote: post #78

gobdovan wrote: post #38

I had the same thought about ML engineering a while back, when Google released the AutoML suite, that was banned from Kaggle competitions. At the time, it seemed obvious to me that the closer you were to the models, the easier it was for them to replace your work, since most of the work on models was itself hill-climbing, grind searching and mutation search. So, the more your work is an explicit, measurable search lo…

I agree with you, although you could argue that history teaches the opposite, for example the many jobs that disappeared after medieval times, even if they existed for centuries. Maybe you will still find a cobbler or a blacksmith, but now it's something very niche; which is more or less the point of the post.