AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#2I feel like there's a market out there for a weekly newsletter that summarises all the AI takes like this and collects the one meaningful snippet of insight (if any)
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#3I've always been motivated by making simple solid foundations in my code the fastest way possible.
So for me being able to have AI wrote certain things extremely fast with me just doing voice to text with my specific approach, is amazing.
I am all in on everything AI and have a discord server just for openclaw and specialized per repo assistants. It really feels like when I'm busy I can throw it an issue tracker number for things.
Then I will ssh via vs code or regular ssh which forwards my ssh key from 1password. My agents have read only repo access and I can push only when I ssh in. Super secure. Sorry for the tangent to the article but I have always loved coding now I love it even more.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#4The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones.
No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level.
An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#5I'm not sure if it's made engineering harder, but it's certainly changing what it means to be a good engineer. It's no longer just about writing code. Now it's increasingly about having good taste, making the right decisions, and sometimes just being blessed with the Midas touch.
In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later.
I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die - it was inspired by another conversation on HN.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#6[flagged]
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#7The author introduces the term "Supervision Paradox", but IMHO this is simply one instance of the "Automation Paradox" [1], which has been haunting me since I started working in IT.
Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#8The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.
> it took away the easy parts
This is the key. I haven't found that things have become harder. The hard parts are still hard, and those have been the most important and prominent parts of my job once I reached a certain level.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#9I still feel like I'm writing code. I tell Claude what to write and I am very specific about it. There's still tons of problems for which Claude has no particular solution and it's on me and other humans to figure out what to do. For those cases where I tell it to just go off and write a whole script that I'm not even looking at, those are throwaway / low-value cases I dont care about where previously I'd not have even taken on that particular job.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#10I'm not sure if it's made engineering harder, but it's certainly changing what it means to be a good engineer. It's no longer just about writing code. Now it's increasingly about having good taste, making the right decisions, and sometimes just being blessed with the Midas touch. In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later. I wrote somethi…
> It's no longer just about writing code
It never was