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We might all be AI engineers now

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Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#81

Post by scruple »

JR1427 wrote: post #62
0x3f wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit simplistic. The bakery can just expand its product range or do various other things to add work. In fact that's exactly what I would expect to happen at a tech company, ceteris paribus.

This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI". What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?

How much more productive are we supposed to be in engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large derives from having the typing machine type faster.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#82

Post by bitwize »

miningape wrote: post #36
noemit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a PEBKAC issue.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#83

Post by choutos »

kif wrote: post #73
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 that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code. LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing…

This is a fair observation, and I think it actually reinforces the argument. The burnout you're describing comes from treating AI output as "your code that happens to need review." It's not. It's a hypothesis. Once you reframe it that way, the workflow shifts: you invest more in tests, validation scenarios, acceptance criteria, clear specs. Less time writing code, more time defining what correct looks like. That's not extra work on top of engineering. That is the engineering now. The teams I've seen adapt best are the ones that made this shift explicit: the deliverable isn't the code, it's the proof that the code is right.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#84

Post by sn0wflak3s »

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…

The K-shaped workforce point is sharp and I think you're right. The curious ones are a minority, but they've always been the ones who moved things forward. AI just made the gap more visible :)

Your Codex case study with the content creators is fascinating. A PhD in Biology and a masters in writing building internal tools... that's exactly the kind of thing i meant by "you can learn anything now." I'm surrounded by PhDs and professors at my workplace and I'm genuinely positive about how things are progressing. These are people with deep domain expertise who can now build the tools they need. It's an interesting time. please write that up...

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#85

Post by sn0wflak3s »

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…

This is the question I keep coming back to. I don't have a clean answer yet.

The foundation I built came from years of writing bad code and understanding why it was bad. I look at code I wrote 10 years ago and it's genuinely terrible. But that's the point. It took time, feedback, reading books, reviewing other people's work, failing, and slowly building the instinct for what good looks like. That process can't be skipped.

If AI shortens the path to output, educators have to double down on the fundamentals. Data structures, systems thinking, understanding why things break. Not because everyone needs to hand-write a linked list forever, but because without that foundation you can't tell when the AI is wrong. You can't course-correct what you don't understand.

Anyone can break into tech. That's a good thing. But if someone becomes a purely vibe-coding engineer with no depth, that's not on them. That's on the companies and institutions that didn't evaluate for the right things. We studied these fundamentals for a reason. That reason didn't go away just because the tools got better.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#86

Post by sn0wflak3s »

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.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#87

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#88

Post by sn0wflak3s »

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.

I get this. I don't think either of you is wrong. There's a real loss in not writing something from scratch and feeling it come together under your hands. I'm not dismissing that.

I have immense respect for the senior engineers who came before me. They built the systems and the thinking that everything I do now sits on top of. I learned from people. Not from AI. The engineers who reviewed my terrible pull requests, the ones who sat with me and explained why my approach was wrong. That's irreplaceable. The article is about where I think things are going, not about what everyone should enjoy.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#89

Post by bitwize »

miningape wrote: post #71
bitwize wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Seems strange, for decades we allowed developers to use what made them comfortable, you like notepad? go ahead and use it. Don't want an LSP? that's fine disable it. So long as their productivity was on par with the rest of the team there was no issue. Suddenly, everyone needs to use this new tool (which we haven't proven to actually be effective) and if you don't you don't belong in the industry.

> So long as their productivity was on par with the rest of the team there was no issue.

Emphasis added. And anyway, for most software dev in most shops it wasn't true; most development takes place in whatever IDE the group/organization standardized on for the task, to make sure everyone gets proper tooling and to make collaboration and information sharing easier. Think of all the Java enterprise software developed by legions of drones in the 2000s and 2010s. They all used Eclipse, because Eclipse is what they were given.

It's only with the emergence of whiny, persnickety Unix devs who refused to leave the comforting embrace of their editor of choice that shops in the internet/dotcom/startup tradition embraced a "use whatever tools you want" philosophy. They had uncharacteristically enormous leverage over the tech stack being deployed in such businesses and could force employers to make that concession. And anyway, what some of them could do with vi blew the boss's mind.

It is true that we don't have a whole lot of hard data from large organizations that show AI productivity improvements. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Turns out, most large organizations just haven't adopted AI in the amount and ways that could make a big impact.

But we have enough anecdata from competent developers to suggest that the productivity gains are huge. So big, AI not only lets you do your normal tasks many times faster, it puts projects within reach that you would not have countenanced before because they were too complex or tedious to be worth the payoff.

So no. Refusing to use AI is just pure bloodymindedness at this point—like insisting on using a keypunch while everyone around you discovers the virtues of CRT terminals and timesharing. There were people like this even in the 1970s when IBM finally came around and made timesharing available in their mainframes. Those people either got up to speed or moved on to a different profession. They couldn't keep working the way they'd been working because the productivity expectations changed with the availability of new technology.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#90

Post by sn0wflak3s »

kif wrote: post #73
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 that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code. LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing…

This is a fair point. The cognitive load is real. Reviewing AI output is a different kind of exhausting than writing code yourself.

Even when the output is "guided," I don't trust it. I still review every single line. Every statement. I need to understand what the hell is going on before it goes anywhere. That's non-negotiable. I think it gets better as you build tighter feedback loops and better testing around it, but I won't pretend it's effortless.

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